Mindful Looking

My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama. I’m a poet.

One night, I woke at 3 a.m. and looked out my apartment window to the city road below. There was a heavy fog, and I could see the lights of the street lamps and the passing lights of an occasional car. This is a description of what I know was happening, but what could I actually see?

I could see night purple and thick triangular shafts of orange draping down from the street lights. The foliage across the road no longer looked like foliage; it was a dark green blur, and the sharp lines of the road markings were ghost lines, inferring a pathway to something other than north or south.

There was a strange sheen over all colors, as if the texture of air became tangible, as if, if I had a knife sharp enough, I could cut a slice of it. It wasn’t fog I was seeing. Fog is what I call what I was seeing, but what was in front of me was far more than the quick word I’d give it.

What you’re looking at in front of you right now is one of a number of dawn scenes that Claude Monet made. Monet only died in 1926 at the age of 86 years old. He’s one of the Impressionists.

He’s interested in recording the actual impression of what he saw, rather than the shorthand terminology we have of what he saw. He was meticulous in trying to represent on canvas the world as it appeared to him, and, as it impressed itself on his sight.

This piece, Branch of the Seine near Giverny, is—in terms of its location—a branch in Giverny, about 50 miles west and a little north of Paris. It’s where Monet lived much of the second half of his life. He made many such paintings and to do this, he had a flat-bottomed boat—specially designed with slats to separate the wet, painted canvases—which he’d board before dawn and go to the same location.

You see here how this canvas is an unusual square shape, adding to a certain disorientation.

He’d paint for seven minutes on one canvas before moving to another canvas, before moving to another, trying to capture the various stages of light as the sun rose. Dawntime—each few minutes renders the light, the color, the shapes, the specificity or vagueness of things in a different register.

While Monet started the paintings in his specially designed boat, he completed them in the studio, where he could judge how they harmonized one with another.

The American writer Annie Dillard, in her book Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek, described a person who’d had their sight restored having been blind since birth.

Looking at the way sunlight hit the green leaves of a tree, this person asked, “Who put the lights in the tree?” This is what I’m talking about with looking: it’s not forensic analysis I’m interested in; it’s freshness.

Let go of what you should or shouldn’t see—what do you see?

Claude Monet wished to capture the instantaneity of light on the canvas. Impressionists sometimes seem like they’re looking at things through a misty lens, but actually what they’re doing, is looking at their looking, refusing the clarity that classification would give, eschewing the sharp lines that would make things easily defined to the eye that wants in art what nature isn’t giving—especially in early light. Monet urged other artists to “paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see.”

The task of looking at the way things were. Monet called terrifying, a word that implies both fear through terror, as well as the exhilaration of terrific. Now, what do we see here? Is your eye drawn to the feeling of the color? Are you trying to perceive pattern? Do you see the way there’s a reflection in the water, how what is seen in the water’s reflection is different to what is seen above.

James Baldwin, in an untitled poem, writes “the light blinds me to the light,” and this may be a way of entering into this Monet painting. The metaphor of light is often one that is imagined to reveal, but here, the light is its own phenomenon, concealing as well as revealing.

Where is it coming from, this light?

Above and below.

The mist diffuses the light so that everything is held together and borders are blurred.

Where is the border between above and below? We cannot see it; it has no line. It is in between. Undefined.

To return to James Baldwin’s line, “the light blinds me to the light,” in what way does your wish to know what you are seeing impair what is plainly in front of you?

Right now, what do you see? Don’t try to classify it; just see it, all around you, in this gallery. Colors blending into color without strict boundaries in between. A person. A wall. Paint. Clothes. Light on a face, reflected from a phone, a bag. A purple. An unexpected green. Blue and other blues.

My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and I’m a poet. I’m interested in what happens in the space between the person and the art they are observing. I’m interested too in what happens in a person, you, while you’re looking at a particular piece of art.

Before we talk a little about Marc Chagall’s America Windows, here’s a question:

If you were to gather items from your life that represent gratitude, what would they be? Actual items: A letter you’ve kept for years. A pair of gloves someone gave you. A tree you loved looking at in the evening light.

Imagine making a huge canvas and then in glorious, higgledy-piggledy, random arrangements, placing all of these items on the canvas—each representing a moment of gratitude.

Some of them gratitude because the alternative was a terror.
Some of them pure, delicious delight.
Some of them representing pastimes and memories.
Some of them representing a story where you didn’t know what to do until something or someone came along to help you.

There’s an idea in poetry—the objective correlative—where instead of telling someone what to feel, you put an object in the poem that holds the memory of a feeling—say, gratitude or loneliness or fear.

In many ways, Chagall’s America Windows are a kind of exploration of a dreamscape of objective correlatives. The objects all correlate to gratitude.

Born in 1887 to a Jewish family in modern-day Belarus, Chagall left his home country in his mid-30s, living in Paris and Berlin.

He became a French citizen in 1937, but within a few years he fled Nazi-occupied France and spent most of the 1940s in the United States. He returned to France in 1948.

These windows before you, the gloriously titled America Windows, were created as a gift to the United States and celebration of the US Bicentennial.

The windows are a gift to Chicago and to the US.

“I lived here in America during the inhuman war in which humanity deserted itself,” Chagall said. Looking over to the right, you can see the Chicago skyline, as well as the Statue of Liberty (Chagall had also lived in New York.)

You can see many other representations in this piece too.

Above all, music on the top left corner.

Sometimes standing in front of America Windows, I wonder what it would sound like. I imagine that there is more than just one musician.

The blues and other colors of these light-filled stained glass would sound out … what? A harmonious simplicity? Not in my mind.

I always imagine this to be a rising cacophony of delight, a pandemonium of trilling tubes, notes, squeaks, and joy.

The sound of gratitude.

Look at the bottom right corner of the first panel, the one on the left, and you’ll see a bottle, a glass, and maybe some fruit.

The table of humanity and welcome. Appetites, met with nurture.

And over in the middle window—that bird, flying uplifted, and the olive branch, or something like it—of peace. Far above the citadel below, all those little windows in America Windows.

Everything here is suspended in blue—dark blue to light blue. And we see the vivacity of it because of the light shining through it. Stained glass works in this way. It is an interplay between the art itself, the light behind it, and what happens to us when we are shone upon by the source of light behind the work.

Here’s what Chagall said: “To me, stained glass is the transparent wall between my heart and the world’s. Stained glass is uplifting, it requires gravity and passion. It must come alive through the light it receives.”

America Windows is unabashedly about gratitude and hope.

From a Jewish artist who knew the horrors of anti-Semitism and threat and holocaust. There’s a hard-won celebration for this.

Chagall was 90 years old when he created these windows; he died in 1985, just a few years short of his 100th birthday.

The six panels represent music, painting, literature, architecture, theater, and dance.

An uplifting of art, and making and life and gratitude and survival. How, having known so much terror, having moved, and moved, and moved, can you make such a testament to joy?

Here’s what Chagall said: “If all life moves inevitably toward its end, then we must, during our own, color it, with our colors of love and hope.”

My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama. I am a poet, and I’m interested in what happens in the space between a piece of art and the person who is observing the art.

For me, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks is iconic. It’s a piece that’s had a lot of pop culture references too. From The Simpsons and Blade Runner, to Michael Connelly’s fictional detective Harry Bosch. Its color, its space, its simplicity and sophistication have been an invitation for many, but maybe today you are one of the lucky ones who is experiencing this brilliance for the first time.

And whether for the first or 50th time, welcome. Let your looking be fresh and alive. To look at a painting is to experience many things at once.

Perhaps you wonder about Edward Hopper, the artist. Who was he? What was happening in his life that he was drawn to make this striking painting?

Or perhaps you’re interested in what’s being depicted in the painting. Who are these characters? The man and the woman near each other, touching. The server. The person with the hat.

Or maybe the painting is doing some work in you, and your experience is less of what’s happening in the painting or, in the life of the painter, but more about what’s happening in your life as you look at it.

Every work of art is like this.

It’s some sort of opaque window into the interests and circumstance of the artist. It’s also got a life of its own, and it makes something happen in the space between you and it.

What’s happening for you today? Are you curious about Hopper or the time he made this? Or are you involved in the scene of this painting set in an unrecognizably quiet New York City? Or are you somewhere in your own memory, transported perhaps by something in the work?

Edward Hopper lived near Washington Square Park in New York City for much of his life, and many of his paintings have a quality of stillness or aloneness. He said he didn’t do this deliberately, but he knew that large cities can be places of loneliness.

Every life has a relationship with loneliness: maybe you have travelled through loneliness to satisfaction, or you can find ease when by yourself among many people, or maybe loneliness causes some strain for you. However you are with loneliness today, you can bring that to the characters on the canvas of Nighthawks.

Here, even in a populated scene, there is an air of stillness.

I always think of the two characters sitting near each other as sitting in silence. And yet, they are aware of each other—by proximity and by how his right hand and her left hand are reaching across and touching, or almost touching.

It seems like intimacy to me. Who was reaching to whom? Did one of them go first? Is that always you? Or do you wait?

I wonder about the character whose back we see. A suit, a hat. He seems occupied by his own business. We don’t know if he’s looking at a book or his food, or is in his own world.

And the server, who’s he looking at? The couple? His own reflection in the glass? Outside the glass?

And what about you? Are you looking at the time? Or the couple, or the server? Or the character who’s back and hat we see?

Who would you want to be? And a different question: who, whether you’re happy with it or not, do you feel like you are in this painting?

The indoor light depicted in this painting is strong. Outside it seems like evening, and the streets of Hopper’s New York are clean and empty.

The fluorescent light had come into usage in the early 1940s, and Hopper began this painting in December 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Maybe that’s the moment that’s been caught in the imagination of the characters. The moment when their country changed, or the evening right after or the night before.

What change are you at? Are you working through it, or in company, or finding time by yourself?

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, many US cities prohibited bright lights at night, fearing further attacks. But not in this painting.

Here we see Hopper’s recognizable characters, some of them alone, some of them occupied with other things, all of them seeming to exist in quiet and illuminated by light. The shops and upstairs apartments nearby are all in darkness.

Maybe these characters are defying fear. Maybe it is that fear reveals something about our disposition.

Today where are you going with this image? To the past, to the canvas, to your own experience of it?

And what’s the feeling? And, just as importantly, what’s the feeling of your feeling? Maybe you’re feeling a little bit of loneliness from the painting, but maybe, with that, you’re feeling contentment as you watch the loneliness.

There’s the feeling, and the feeling about the feeling.

Are you thinking of what a city does while the world changes? Or how you respond to outside news, seeking company, seeking solitude in a café? Are you feeling alone? And today, maybe that’s a comfort, not a burden.

Perhaps you’re alongside someone in silence. What’s the feeling of the feeling that comes with this?

Nighthawks. What a title. Is it the name of the cafe, or is it the name for the people who gather there? People who are awake when many others are asleep in a still, quiet city.

What would it feel like to be in this place? What would it feel like to sense the orange sun on your skin at this hour of morning or dusk? Imagine the temperature as its glow illuminates the stone banister and harmonizes with a sherbet sky behind the tree line. What would it sound like to be here? Maybe it would be quiet. Or you might imagine the din of insects buzzing and trees murmuring in a slow wind.

The artist who created this painting, René Magritte, explored that which cannot be seen. He was interested in the visible and the invisible: What he described as heat or weight or pleasure.

When we attune to the subtle details of our environment, even the ones that can only be felt, not seen, we can learn to become more present and bring this attention to our internal environment too. Much like how you imagined the sensory experience of this landscape, you can direct this careful observation inward. Allow yourself to inhabit this moment of stillness.

Let your eyes be easy. They can keep looking around or you might close them gently.

Scan through the body to notice any sensations that are present. Describe them, even subtle ones.

Do you notice any kind of temperature or air current? Scan down through your ears and notice what is there. And then your neck, your shoulders. Notice the weight of your arms and your hands.

Now bring your attention to your chest. Feel the motion of your breath, your heartbeat. Let your attention lower down through your belly, your pelvis, and down to your legs and feet.

Think of any words that describe your overall sense of your body right now. Is it warm? Comfortable? Neutral?

Paying attention to the things outside your body, exteroception, and the things inside your body, interoception, and meeting sensations with calm awareness can tell your nervous system that your body is safe.

Bring your awareness back to the painting in front of you. Looking back at this landscape, which may feel familiar by now, what more can you notice? What do you sense here that can’t be seen? What is more subtle and more unusual than anything you think you already know?

Settle in so that you can linger here for a while. Let this painting fill your field of vision and soften your gaze so that you can take it all in. Invite the micro-muscles around your eyes to relax.

Unfurrow your brow. Loosen your jaw. Dissolve any tension in your face so that the portal of your vision widens and you can absorb this painting more fully.

Now rest your gaze on one line and follow it for as long as you can. Notice what happens as the line moves. How does it change? Does it become something else? Does it disappear entirely?

Imagine how the artist Brice Marden must have moved his body to create these crests and valleys.

Stretching his arms out long, reaching high and low and across, and moving fluidly. His brush, an extension of his body. Marden worked slowly and deliberately to inscribe these lines.

Earlier in his career, he studied the calligraphy of eighth-century Chinese Tang poets. In such works, each written character is infused with its own energy and momentum, order and emotion. A calligrapher, writing mindfully, might let their breath guide their brush.

Each stroke emerges through a union of the mind, body, and breath.

Considering again how Marden inscribed these lines, can you imagine how he might have breathed consciously in sync with his brush? Try to trace them with your own breath. Beginning with your next inhale, find a line that you can follow upwards with your gaze, exhaling as it peaks and slopes downward.

You might invoke the phrase, as the line travels up, I breathe in. As it travels down, I breathe out.

As the line travels up, I breathe in. As it travels down, I breathe out.

Marden described a work of art as a renewable source of energy. As you breathe in harmony with this painting, can you feel the energy of your inhale and the calm of your exhale?

Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh described his mindful calligraphy as a practice of breathing and concentration.

He said: "to be alive is a miracle, and when you breathe in mindfully, you touch the miracle of being alive."

Come up close to this painting and let your eye move freely throughout it. Your natural gaze may move quickly through the riot of energetic color at the center, or slowly scan the undulating white tones around the edges. Can you follow each swath of color, each drip of paint, each individual application that intertwines like a labyrinth or a bird’s nest?

Artist Joan Mitchell titled this painting City Landscape. By 1955, she had lived in Chicago, New York, and Paris. Imagine the energy of these metropolitan areas: the glittering lights, the constant motion, the cacophony of sound.

The layers of vibrant color here might suggest chaos, but her process was slow and deliberate. “I paint a little,” she said, “then I sit and look at the painting, sometimes for hours. Eventually, the painting tells me what to do.”

Each mark in this painting might seem to constitute an element of the landscape. For Mitchell, her brushstrokes conveyed not only the essence of a physical thing—whether a building, or tree, or street, or cloud—but also her tangled strokes express the intermingling of memory, place, and feeling. The gestures of her hand possess the dynamism associated with cities, as well as the force of sensory impressions.

Think of a recent experience in a bustling city, and bring to mind as many sensory memories as possible. What could you see? What could you hear? Did it feel exciting or stressful? Were you rushing or lost in thought?

When you navigate urban space, how might you pay more careful attention to every detail in your awareness? One way of becoming present is to listen to your world with a wakeful attention. Begin now by noticing your body in this space.

Scan through and sense if there’s any part of you that wants to let go a little right now. Where might you relax a bit, and, relax more? Start to listen to any sounds around you. You might hear the sound of my voice, the sound of your own breathing, or any external sounds in this environment.

The museum is full of aliveness, a hive of constant activity. Notice each sound as it begins and ends, rising and falling like waves in the sea. Can you welcome each sound into an inner atmosphere of receptivity, a place that is vast and open and gentle? Each sound occurring in the theater of your awareness interplaying with your internal experience.

In Mitchell’s brushstrokes, you might notice where one color begins and ends, or the texture of the paint. Pay attention to the way each mark arises and falls like the sounds in your awareness.

Notice how this figure expresses anger in every part of his body. Six hands are raised to fists, and his brow furrows with eyes narrowed to an intense gaze on each of his four faces. Flames explode from the crown of his head, and he tramples two figures underfoot.

You might be wondering what this sculpture can teach us about mindfulness. We might sometimes consider anger to be an unpleasant or destructive emotion, but this figure’s rage is a force for good.

It was created in the Japanese esoteric Buddhist tradition and represents the deity Gōzanze Myō-ō. He is one among a group of wrathful gods who play an important role in the Buddhist pantheon. He is prepared to vanquish anything that stands in the way of enlightenment. For instance, the figures beneath his feet represent the gods of unruly human passion. They stand in the way of awakening, and his fiery rage helps clear these obstacles to enlightenment.

His hands are raised in a symbolic gesture called a mudra, and this one symbolizes the subjugation of his rivals.

When we experience anger in our everyday lives, how can it help us become more wise? Often, anger appears when we perceive injustice or harm. Anger can be a signal that you feel strongly about something, and it can fuel wise action. Instead of being consumed by our anger, what if we let it wake us up to our deepest intentions and values?

Bring to mind a situation that triggers anger for you. It could be something personal in your life, in a relationship, or at work, or a sense of injustice on the societal level. Invite in this emotional experience. What caused it? Where were you? How did you react?

How did it feel in your body to be gripped by anger? Is there someone you were blaming or felt you needed to fight? You might think of this anger as a first responder, like a firefighter in an emergency situation.

It’s a feeling that’s ready to jump into action when something feels threatened, just like this deity, tensed and ready to fight. As you investigate this experience of anger, notice if your reaction was trying to protect something—your desire to be good or right, a sense of morality or virtue.

When we learn to pause in these moments of reactivity, we can emerge with clarity about our deepest intentions. Practicing presence helps us wake up to what really matters. What really matters to you?

What is your deepest intention in this moment? Is it to speak truth? To be a force for good? To create a better world for future generations? To alleviate the suffering of others? Let this be the intention that guides your action. Next time you feel the grip of anger, may it fuel the awakening of wisdom and compassion.

Before we begin to reflect on the experience of this room. Take a short moment to breathe. You’re here. The room is in no hurry. You can also relax as you stand or sit.

My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and I’m here with you to reflect on some of the things happening in you as you are in this place—the Andō Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This is not a chapel or a place of prayer, but I always find it a spiritual thing to be here. Spiritual sounds abstract, but it’s not. Spirit from spirare, meaning breath. A place of breathing, not suffocation.

You are standing in a room of oak-veneered columns. Interestingly, they are not the art. They are the space between you and the art. You can see past and around them, but not through them. The light is low, mimicking outside light coming in through small cracks. The art pieces in here change, but the pillars don’t.

Something that does change, though, is you. You’re here. You are a person standing in a place divided by these 16 freestanding pillars. How tall are you? How deeply are you breathing? Let yourself relax into the best kind of breathing for you now.

Each pillar is ten feet tall and one foot square, taller than a person. Are they trees? No. Are they like trees? What do you think? Because of the pillars, you see the space around you differently.
Someone is walking around them. Some part of that person is obscured. And you find yourself drawn to one corner or another because of its exposure or proximity.

This space was designed by Tadao Andō, and he was insistent that this is not a piece of art,
but rather a way of thinking spatially, perhaps even thinking spiritually about space.

The pillars aren’t trees. They aren’t people. But you feel like you’re in the presence of something when you’re here.

Tadao Andō designed the pillars, and he also designed the floors and the benches. You are surrounded and supported by a space specifically designed to hold you right now, as you breathe, as you look, as you experience, as you stand or sit; as you are drawn closer to the experience of this room; as you bring whatever it is that’s on your mind and memory into this place.

What do you feel? Walk one way and another. Find a corner or focus on the room. What places are coming to your mind as you are in this place?

The Jamaican poet Jason Allen Passant writes about being among trees.

"What have trees been used for?
Who acted like they owned them?
Who was allowed to wander between trees?
Who was expected to work?"

How do you feel right now among these pillars? Take a breath and find your place, standing or sitting. Eyes focused or relaxed. Looking at the defined space or letting your eyes roam.

Every space is defined by such markers—the markers of history or of experience. This is where it happened. Or, this is where I was when I got the news. Invisible markers, often known and important only to a few.

What do you feel? Walk one way and another. Find a corner or find a center.

Speaking about another project of his, the Church of the Light, Andō said, “The primary reason is to create a place for the individual, a zone for oneself within society. When the external factors of a city’s environment require the wall to be without openings, the interior must be especially full and satisfying.”

You are now in a room where the wall has no openings. The light is not from outside—the placement of this room wouldn’t allow for that—but the sense is of dim light. Dawn? Late evening?

“The interior must be especially full and satisfying,” Andō said. Full of what? Of the floor. Benches. Pillars. You, and whomever else is here now.

And satisfying. What would satisfy you? A sense of place, the simplicity of surroundings, and the way that the pillars amplify the otherwise emptiness of the room.

There’s wisdom in finding fullness and satisfaction in a room that has low light, sparse contents, and emptiness.