Closer to Discipline than Gesture 2026 is a series of drawings grounded in principles drawn from Ānāpāna meditation. Repetition, colour, and pattern are conditioned as perceptual systems that are being conceptually drawn to attention. Just as in Ānāpāna meditation the object is to repeatedly return to a single, neutral focus – the breath. The drawings operate through a comparable logic: repetition functions as a disciplined method of sustained attention, allowing difference and deviation to emerge within a controlled and stable framework.
Each work is developed through a consistent compositional structure of bands, grids, and segmented fields. This structure operates as a self-imposed constraint, analogous to the fixed point of attention in meditation. Within these limits, minor shifts in scale, direction, spacing, and colour become perceptually amplified. These changes are not expressive gestures but measured observations on attention. As a result, the drawings function less as expressive images and more as temporal constructions, registering duration through accumulation and repetition.
Colour is treated as a material and phenomenological condition rather than a symbolic or emotive device. Saturated and muted tones are placed in direct relation, producing moments of compression, vibration, and visual pause. As in breath observation, breath and subsequently sensation are attended to without emphasis or hierarchy. Through repetition, colour relationships are allowed to assert themselves gradually, encouraging a slow recalibration of perception and/or immediate impact.
Pattern, within this work, is not decorative but operational. It reflects the patterned nature of cognition itself, there are cycles of attention, distraction, and return without recourse to narrative or representation. Repetition becomes a means of observing these cycles rather than resolving them. Irregularities, asymmetries, and interruptions are retained as structural evidence of perception in flux and flow.
Through sustained discipline, the drawings become a site of concentration. They propose repetition as a method of inquiry that is grounded in restraint, patience, and attentional endurance. Rather than illustrating meditative practice, the work adopts its logic, using patterned systems to examine how states of being are structured, maintained, and continuously renegotiated through acts of attention over time.
morgan veness 