What is spiritual experience? A snowflake melting, a bee sucking honey, a fat man at a traffic light. Trivia.

I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen

We do a lot of looking: we look through lenses, telescopes, television tubes... Our looking is perfected every day, but we see less and less.

For you can look at things while talking or with a radio going full blast, but you can see only when the chatter stops.

What is spiritual experience? A snowflake melting, a bee sucking honey, a fat man at a traffic light. Trivia.

You are not copying nature, but responding to nature in full awareness, to the way nature expresses itself in that object.

It is in order to really see, to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call 'The Ten Thousand Things' around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.