Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action by Frederick Franck

Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action Reviews

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  Phuong Vy Le

  I'd love to write a haiku as the review because the author showed such love for those, but I couldn't. :)
  
  This book is about how we see life and seeing life, living life, we see ourselves. Life is a koan, you can only solve the koan by becoming it. Drawing is a mean to express that process of seeing, becoming, living.
  
  I'm not sure I understand throughoutly what he hopes to transfer, but reading the book is a soothing, calming process. I find myself enjoy his view, his words, his tone, emotions, thoughts. And the drawings really touched me as they contained so much stories, so much life, with a sense of tranquility.
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  Michelle Dujardin

  This book literally changed my life!! I got it as a gift and I use Zen drawing in all my art work now. It inspired me to write my first book in Dutch which was published in 2012 and as a result I was asked by an American publisher to write a practical book with lots of exercises and drawings. Together with other Franck fans we have created a zen drawing Facebook community were people can share their drawings and experiences.
  
  I am very grateful to Frederick Franck for being such an inspiration and hopefully I can help in keeping his work alive.
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  Kathryn MacDonald

  Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing came to my attention in 2013, already a 20-year-old book. Since then I’ve read it a few times and it continues to speak to me. I recommend it to you, especially the travellers and writers among us.
  
  Like Franck, I cannot sit and meditate. I fail to clear my mind of the dribble that pushes its way into any space and silence. Yet, when I sit to sketch, everything disappears except the object of my attention. I slip into Zen-state where an hour or two passes as if it was a moment. Franck explains this magic as he walks readers along the path from his early days of gallery shows to his gradual movement into drawing and eventually to the transcendent moment of the unification between seeing-drawing and the experience of oneness. But I am more writer than sketcher – more years of practice – so besides the sketching advice, I’m taken with the writing advice he offers.
  
  "Bashō, the father of haiku, warned his students: “Jot down your haiku before the heat of perception cools!”
  
  And this is the way Franck suggests we draw. See the object, enter it through the pen, and experience oneness with it. He compares this experience with the fleeting, but timeless, haiku:
  
  "An authentic haiku must, in one breath, grasp the joy as it flies, the tear as it trickles down the cheek. In its seventeen syllables a haiku must catch the unsayable, the mystery of being and non-being: timeless mini-satori in fleeting time:
  
  This dewdrop universe
  Just a dewdrop
  And yet,
  And yet …
  Issa"
  
  This is what the sketcher strives to achieve: the quick rendering and the immediacy of becoming other; the Zen moment (whether it passes in mere seconds or whether it stays with you minutes or more).
  
  A final thought on haiku and drawing: “Haiku transmit neither an idea nor a philosophy; they transmit pure experience into a minimum of words that grasp a moment of grace, be it joyous or heartrending.” When I facilitate writing workshops, this finding the essence of experience is what participants are encouraged to discover through their stories.
  
  One of the reasons I’m back at sketching after a bit of a hiatus is to really see what’s before me when I travel. Like Franck,
  
  "… I entrust my bones again and again to flying contraptions to circle the globe. I can’t help belonging to this generation of the restless, the globetrotters, the astronauts, obsessed with seeking, pursuing salvation elsewhere, as if the black-eyed Susans in Provence were more black-eyed than the ones in my backyard."
  
  He ventures at some length to explain why taking photographs is less apt to allow us into a culture, for example (and can actually be intrusive and alienating) than drawing. In addition, with photography, the Zen experience is more elusive and, if it is present at all, passes within the nanosecond release of the shutter and, with rare exception, fails to capture the essential essence of the subject/experience. Nevertheless, I’ll continue to photograph my travels, but I’ll add to those images the pleasure of sitting in parks, standing in doorways or on a rock by the ocean with pen, blank journal page, and a box of watercolours. To give you two representative examples, recently in both Morocco and in Mexico, people shied away from the camera but when I got the sketchbook out, people came over to peek and to talk about the process.
  
  Discovering the essence of the object, its authenticity, and its oneness in a Zen sense, is what painters and sketchers seek. It is what I seek in my humble, clumsy and beginner’s way. It enhances travel experiences and the memories that follow.
  
• 
  Arlitia Jones

  This book is not about drawing. It's subject is much deeper. How to be? Inside the pages is no formula but encouragement to see. We spend so much of our time looking at the world, yet we rarely take time to see. When we allow ourselves the time to slow and open to what is really before us we can't help but become part of it, or the world becomes part of us. To have this kind of approach to the world would of course change the way one draws, but it also changes the way we interact and worship, if you will, the world around us. This is a book I will return to again and again for reminders.
• 
  Denise

  This is no ordinary drawing instruction book. Mr. Frank talks about the all-important difference between looking and actually seeing, and what goes on in the mind and body when the act of drawing takes place. It is very difficult to put such things into words, and he does it so well. The author's own drawings grace every page, and perfectly illustrate the concepts presented in the text.
• 
  Tina

  Exceptional meditation on how to really see the world around you. this book helped to strengthen my poetry writing as well.
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  Michaela

  I enjoyed the sketches, but truthfully it didn't inspire me to pick up the pen.
• 
  Stephen

  Franck is a renewed favorite. I was obsessed with a book of his I have had for 20 years and just picked this one up and read it in full.
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  Christina Bloomfield

  Another Taoist gem I’ve stored on my bookshelf too long. It deserved another read. “Splendor! Nothing is commonplace. All is bringing with the Splendor- without Why.”
• 
  Scoats

  I really wanted to like this book. I have long tried to maintain a Zen outlook, and have recently taken up drawing in a more serious way. As I started drawing daily, I decided to dust this book off and finally read it. After years of sitting on my shelf, the stars were aligned. I was ready for insights on how to draw better and to be more Zen. I was an open vessel.
  
  I got about 1/3 of the way through and didn't find any help on being a better illustrator.
  
  The author is very sincere without an ounce of pretension. For me, there just isn't enough for a whole book. It's very repetitive and often quite dull, with a lot of filler. Though the drawings are nice. Nice, but nothing I wanted to take a picture of.
  
  Ironically while giving this book a less than stellar review, I do intend to act as the author intended. I plan to continue drawing every day, not just because practice is how one gets better, but as a purposeful act of stillness and active meditation. Maybe that's not irony, just Zen, and maybe if I finished reading it I'd know.
  
  I'm going drop this off at the local Little Free Library. Maybe it can help someone else on their Way.
  
  LATER THOUGHTS
  Before dropping this off , I gave it another look. I didn't want to be too hasty. I paged through the chapters I didn't read which reconfirmed my decision to bail.
  
  Also I have been coming back to the author's statement that he didn't like his works to be called sketches. He didn't sketch, he drew. The more I thought on that, I realized while I appreciated a lot of his work, I didn't love it. There was no fun, no joy. It was just autopilot, and that's not really art. It's something, but it's not really art.
  
  
  
  ABOUT MY COPY
  Before the Web and eReaders made paper fairly obsolete for me, I was a member of the Quality Paperback Book Club, sort of a Columbia House deal. If you played those clubs right, you could get a lot of content for little cost. Which is why Columbia House went bust. But that's another story.
  
  One of the QPB free bonuses was a smallish unlined notebook, which I held onto for years unused. As I got serious about drawing every day, I was ready to have a real sketch book. That notebook was perfect. Which got me thinking about QBC and the books I got through them. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing was one of them.
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  Rick Hollis

  I am not a Buddhist, but I have come to appreciate aspect of Zen in my nature study and and photography. This book, especially early on really was useful in giving me insight too a way of opening myself up.
  
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  Gloria

  I've had this book for some time and I always go back to it.
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  David Wu

  "The meaning of life is to see" - Hui Neng