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Free Association
The painting-yoga connection
By Kat Sawyer

Connecting painting and yoga may seem like a stretch, but as both a yoga teacher and a painter I've learned that the principles of the mat can also be applied to the canvas.

While practicing yoga, I'm aware of what both my mind and my body are doing in each moment. Likewise, the act of painting keeps me rooted in the here and now—my hands, eyes and mind are in a perfect moment-to-moment flow, and hours pass unnoticed in a moving meditation.

All artists strive to reach this "flow" state of vinyasa that we strive for in yoga. How do we get there? By trusting the wisdom of our bodies rather than the tricks of our minds. A painting teacher may ask, "What color is asphalt?" Our habituated brains blurt out "gray," but our eyes tell us something different. Depending on the light, the pavement may be yellow, pink, blue or any other of the almost limitless combinations of colors. The practice of painting, like yoga, encourages us to slow down, focus
and trust what our body tells us rather than what our brains assume. When our minds trust our eyes and our eyes trust our hands, we flow.

Another important yogic principle, namste, affirms that "When I look at you, I see the divine." Similarly, when I choose a subject for a painting, the sacred in me recognizes the sacred in an oak tree, a face or a jug of sunflowers. Elevating the ordinary to the extraordinary is the artist's way. Applying yogic techniques and principles to painting has deepened both my understanding of the process and my appreciation of the result.

Kat Sawyer is an artist in Sherman Oaks, California.
Visit www.katsawyer.com.

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Extreme Painting
Sometimes plein air painting feels more like a sport than an art form.

By Kat Sawyer / Artists Sketchbook Magazine / October 2003

The excitement of capturing those last golden rays as the weary day slips into an indigo sea ... the exhilaration of evoking the essence of a winter morning ... the horror of a squadron of mosquitoes sending you screaming from your unfinished nocturne ... this is the world of plein air painting-or what I call painting in the extreme.

My obsession began innocently enough. I was simply looking for something to do while my boyfriend went fishing. I like nature. I like to paint. First consideration: what to wear. Plein Air Painters of California: The Southland (Westphal Publishing) makes it all look so romantic. It pictures men in suits, berets and cool-looking smocks. Women in long skirts and darling straw hats recline under quaint umbrellas as they capture on canvas the beauty of unpolluted skies and breathtaking vistas.

My painting ensemble is bizarre. I wear an itchy straw gardener's hat that has developed the annoying habit of slipping down toward the bridge of my nose. My face and neck are smeared with some sort of 1,000 SPF goo that I pray won't sweat into my eyes. Zinc oxide chalks my nose and lips. A paint-spattered Solumbra shirt tucks into a pair of overalls bulging with wallet, beeper, cell phone and a small bottle of Evian. Underneath this disaster, I sport support hose, orthotics and hiking boots. To complete the look: gloves. Latex gloves. I look like a hideous clown. "Oh well," I tell myself. "It's not how I look, it's how I see."

I bravely flirt with cataracts and varicose veins. I laugh at crow's feet (ha-ha), but lately I've been wondering how Botox would affect my perception of values.

I'm beginning to think that plein air painting is a sport for the young. Along with extreme skiing and extreme snowboarding, how about extreme painting? You know, like painting while hang gliding, scuba diving or raising three kids.

My endurance one Sunday mooning somewhere outside of Mammoth more than qualifies me. It was just my talent and I, pitted against gale force winds that seemed to have kicked up the moment I clipped on my canvas. Bracing for the worst, I anchored my setup by hooking one end of a bungee cord to my easel and the other to my shoelaces. While my right hand gripped the brush, my left hand alternately steadied the umbrella and kept the Turpenoid from gleefully splashing all over my palette. An eternity later, I emerged beat, but not beaten, and there was so much grit on my canvas it looked like a fresco. Painting on location? Yeah, it's extreme.

If, that is, you can find a location. I feel as if I'm being hounded by the specter of urban sprawl. If I delete any more housing developments from my paintings, all that's going to be left is sky. And why is it that the best views are always from the turnout lanes on the freeway?

If you happen to find a spot, you'd better pray it's close to your car or that you have a Sherpa to help you with all your stuff. Aside from painting gear, my backpack is bursting with tent spikes, ropes, bug spray, plastic hammer, PowerBars, snakebite kit, baby wipes, Swiss army knife, two headlamps, batteries and more zinc oxide. It's like camping in panty hose.

Is it all worth it? Extremely.

So if, on your next sojourn into the wilderness, you hear out of the shadows of an alpine lake, or over the roar of the surf at Laguna Beach, or echoing through a forgotten canyon, something that sounds like "! #$%* Nature!" don't be alarmed. It's just the plaintive wail of the plein air painter.

It's the sound of art being born.

Kat Sawyer is a plein air painter living in Sherman Oaks, California.

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Sawyer's paintings interpret nature

By Jean McKig On Art / The Desert Sun

Sunday, November 19, 2000

The subject of Kat Sawyer's paintings at the George Shaffer Fine Art gallery at The Art Place seems to be anchored in recognizable reality, a forest glen, a nightscape, moments of nature captured in the freeze frame of the moment.

One can envision being in these scenes that tug at the memory. But after viewing them, it is apparent that the paintings are more metaphorical interpretations of nature, the stuff of dreams.

Sawyer's ability to transport the viewer into another, more spiritual realm is considerable. She has returned the romantic tradition of landscape painting to its rightful place and made a love for the sublime acceptable.

Nature has always offered Sawyer her greatest challenges and her most profound sanctuary. She has climbed mountains and jumped off of them. She has slept under the stars and crawled under the earth. She's cavorted with dolphins and collected cowrie shells at a hundred feet below.

For Sawyer, painting "en plein-air" is another way to touch the heart of nature, dodging insects and avoiding rattlesnakes in a quest for that fleeting amber moment when mountain tops blush salmon and the oak glows from within. Weathering wind and haze and heat to capture the light on an elusive eucalyptus tree in a field of poppies, standing ankle-deep in fresh powder snow while frozen fingers try to communicate the majesty of the High Sierra morning are commonplace experiences for the artist.

Driven by her love of nature, Sawyer offers this quote from Jon Muir as her personal mantra, "One touch of nature makes all the world kin."

Painting on-site, as plein-air denotes, fixes the moment with its particular light and captures forever a scene never to be repeated in the same exact way. Sawyer does not suffer from her relationship with landscape, dealing with its mannered way. She painstakingly exerts her art upon it chronicling all its fullness and the light-filled fragrances of the outdoors. The reality only constitutes a point of departure where Sawyer can satisfy her desire to delve deeper and enclose the subject in a magic circle, exalting its emotional accents.

In her work, Sawyer uses her artistic expression to unite her search for enlightenment and the need to communicate in a body of work that surpasses the confines of direct experience. At times with confidently brushed blotches, she seems to assign an evocative role to color, a role of transfiguration in which she takes the most fascinating notes from color and in a serene manner infuses the spirit of her landscapes with a feeling of enchanted mystery.

In some of her canvases, her brushstrokes produce fuzzy edges that blur the reality with a gentle tile of perspective that lifts the viewer above the horizon ­ it seems as thought the viewer has the perspective of a low flying bird. Her work invites the viewer into the scene and makes viewing a personal experience. Everything in these landscape paintings is specific enough for the attention but sufficiently vague enough to raise the question of where it is and what it means, a question answered only by experiencing Sawyer's work.

Jean Mckig is a free-lance writer based in Pinyon Crest.

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