Franck, Frederick. The Zen of Seeing: Seeing and Drawing as Meditation. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
In The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation, Frederick Franck tries to answer the question, "What is Zen?" He formulates a definition from a connection between both Zen and drawing's requirement of "quietness of mind." Franck describes Zen as an "Authentic, personal experience" and says that western culture's inability to reach Zen is due to its everyday bombardment of outside stimuli. Through drawing, the overactive mind of western culture can reach a Zen-like mode of thinking.
Franck's equivalent to the dominant left brain and the Ego is what he calls the "Me" complex. He says that this "Me" characteristic, which all of us possess, must be silenced in order for Zen to take place. For Franck, drawing is the perfect solution to solving this problem. Franck's drawings, which are printed throughout the book, are not pretty pictures, but a way of becoming one with the subject he is drawing. He describes his drawings as a way of "unlearning about things." In other words, he is trying to remove all the categories and labels that the left brain, or "Me," has placed on things and look at them for what they really are.
Although Franck's drawings are somewhat descriptive, they do not seem to express the "singularity" and "uniqueness" of his subject that Franck preaches about repeatedly throughout the book. He explains that an aspect of Zen in drawing is to separate your subject from all others like it and draw it for its uniqueness. Although Franck says this, his drawings do not reflect this. Many of the details in his drawings are "symbols" that briefly describe and are hardly bring out any uniqueness. For example, on page 5 there is a drawing of an old willow tree that has the same leaves as an apple tree on page 31! Light, fleeting marks connected to a trunk is hardly what I call descripitive of a subject's unique character. Almost all of his drawings throughout the book have a rapid, fleeting, and brief look to them as if he really wasn't "looking" at his subject long enough to gather any information at all about its character.
Franck's drawings without the crutch of words would make them so much more interesting. By talking about what he is trying to do and accomplish with his drawings he is robbing the reader of their own judgement. If the point of Zen in drawing is to get away from the analytical left-brained "Me", I believe writing about your drawings and trying to describe a process that cannot be remotely grasped is surely not the way to go.