I wonder if Cezanne’s comment has a sports analogy. After years of drill and practice where moves progress from strange to natural, an athlete will have what some will describe as body awareness: a situation comes up and the athlete responds without contemplation.

I can imagine a sort of “holding” in Cezanne’s case: there’s the motif out there, the canvas, the paints and brushes. Everything is balanced like a house of cards
and any errant breeze blowing through his mind will cause it to fall down. It’s not time for him to think about his wife or the hole in the roof, but to keep the whole thing balanced on an effervescent knife’s edge until he has written it down safely in paint. It all happens as it has so often before and no “intervention” is called for.

..if I think while painting, if I intervene, why then everything is gone.

Cezanne, quoted by Erle Loran

If however I have been thinking about something such as global warming outside of a painting session, I may go on to chose music that invokes an aspect of compassion (because of my thoughts on global warming) for example because I want to display the emotion of compassion in a painting.

Back in the painting process, if for any reason my mind wanders, my purpose is to bring the mind back to the music, to the canvas and to letting the art unfold - even if I have to do this over and over again.

Outside of my “meditation” or painting process, I may give more thought to global warming for example, and this can deepen my insight into the feeling of compassion in readiness for when I return to the music and the canvas; this is what I think of as my active contemplation followed by meditation.

So for me, the broader thinking goes on outside of the painting process, and the single pointed concentration on the mood, feeling emotion etc. is what I focus on during the actual painting process.

This is a core question. I can imagine this thread going on forever.

Tonight it was the child next door, who sees me as her playmate, and who was trying to secure my undivided attention with the garden hose. Talk about a concentration buster.

In that case I was in worry mode as it took awhile to teach the kid to wear shoes when on the premises and not to mess around with the equipment. As something of an obsessive compulsive, the press of daily problems and responsibilities has always sapped my attention. So, I would say it’s not so much the relative influence of an atmospheric as it is and has been a competition for my hands and mind. Real productivity began with retirement and an empty nest. Sunil, please step up to the mike.

Instead, I try my best to ‘listen’, not so much to ‘voice’ of the object of my one-eyed gazed, but to my intuitive inner voice. The one that says, “You have a connection to this. Don’t think about it now, just picture it ‘intuitively’. Let everything go and react only to the unthought known.”

For me, outside interuptions that trigger other response ‘voices’ only get in the way of the intuitively exploring the connection between me and my subject.