You, Too, Can Zentangle

The public library offered a free class on "Zentangle" drawing, and because all education is good, I attended, having not the slightest idea of what it was, nor any drawing talent, nor much interest in Zen. But that evening I made a work of art and thought it was pretty cool.

The lively woman who taught our class is a public-school art teacher named Megan, who explained that "Zentangle" is "meditative drawing," or the creation of patterns and images in a relaxed fashion, with no pressure and with no such thing as errors. She taught us to create, step by step, the most common Zentangle patterns, plus flowers, and there are more patterns we didn't get to.

"Zentangle" is as fully established as adult coloring, except the Zentangler creates the image rather than filling in somebody else's pre-made image. There are "Zentangle" (registered trademark) starter kits. Megan got us started with Pigma 01 extremely fine-point ink pens, a fine-point Sharpie, and pencils. That and a drawing surface is all a Zentangler needs. We drew on 4 x 4-inch artist's tiles, thick paper rather like the coasters taverns put beneath your beers. Megan showed us a pair of white sneakers she'd decorated with fabric ink, and a photo of a backpack; she's also done a mural on the St. Louis public flood wall; and Pinterest is rife with Zentangler wallpaper, tee shirts, gift boxes, Zentangles in colored ink and watercolored.

Megan told us Zentangle began with a monk who tried to call to lunch an artist who was busy illuminating a sacred manuscript. He called and called and she didn't hear him. She explained, "Oh, I was so into what I was doing I didn't hear you," and I suppose it takes a monk to trademark and monetize that. It was fun and I'm glad I went to get some continuing education and learned something new that anyone can learn to do. I bought my own supplies and intend to Zentangle my way across the Atlantic toward my upcoming overseas adventure.

Nature's Spirograph

Maybe you remember the Spirograph -- a set of interlocking gear wheels and pens that allowed youth to create highly engineered Space-Age designs, mostly circles -- or you recall cutting designs into potatoes and inking the cut edges with a roller inked on a sheet of glass, and then printing the result -- did that in Girl Scouts. And while I haven't done those since, I did pluck the cap from a bolete and placed the cap gills down where a sheet of white paper and a sheet of black paper met, and left it undisturbed overnight -- because spores of unidentified 'shrooms could be light or dark, and the spore print, and its color, and the shapes of the spores themselves, are crucial to a solid I.D., especially for summer mushrooms that have many variants: amanitas, russulas, and then boletes. All of you will know a bolete when you see one. They don't have bladelike gills beneath their caps but have spongelike undersides. The print came out beautifully, the best one yet. It is art. Meanwhile, the cap, on the right, dried out a little. A friend saw the photo and said, "Is that a toasted bagel?"

It's Divine Tradition

Detail of the dome

As you enter

The faith I was raised in, Serbian Orthodox, you probably call Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox; they were so designated because back in the 11th century the Eastern Orthodox Church decided to use instead of Latin the local language of the people. We like color, brocade, gold, silver, ikons, incense, candles, stained glass, and lots of faces looking in at us from the next world -- that's what ikons are, windows into the spiritual world -- and that's why their artists fast and pray and paint them only when divinely inspired, and never sign their names. For these reasons we don't do mosaics.

St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church in Phoenix hired three traditional-style painters from Serbia who worked on the walls and domed ceilings for several weeks at a cost of $130,000 to turn the church into a spiritual experience, and add notes in Cyrillic (and English, where it fit) so you know which of the hundreds of saints you're looking at. The effect is both riotous and harmonious, and the figures, larger-than-life-sized, are detailed down to the toenails; marvelous to see. This is my parents' parish. The liturgy is in Serbian, but the most important prayers and the sermon are repeated in English, for a service lasting two hours, which I spent gazing and marveling at the artwork (see, in the picture at right, the rainbow ring surrounding Jesus). How they made all these scenes and portraits fit, and how they even started to design it, is just about incomprehensible.