Why the Best Work Comes from No Mind
There is a moment in the studio that I live for.
It is not the moment when the idea arrives. It is not the moment when the painting is finished. It is the moment when I stop thinking entirely and something else takes over.
I noticed it gradually, over years of making work. Whenever I was fully inside the act of creating, time expanded. I would look up and hours had passed. And during those hours, I had not been thinking at all. There was no narration. No evaluation. No judgment about whether what I was making was good or right or finished. There was only presence.
That absence of mind is what I am after when I create.
There are moments in the studio where I need my mind. Technique requires it. Structure requires it. Knowing which medium will hold and which will crack, understanding how layers build — these are learned things that live in the mind.
But many of the most alive moments in a painting do not require thinking at all. They require only showing up.
When I am in that state, I feel vibration in my body. I feel my cells awake. My senses gather into a single point of focus. There is a quality to it that I can only describe as being high on life — a clarity that is also a kind of surrender.
I first fully trusted this process while painting from live models. Figurative work demands precision. Measuring. Proportional thinking. But there came a point in every session where I let go of trying to be exact and allowed my intuition to guide the mark. The results surprised me. Much of the abstract mixed media work I still feel most proud of today came from that surrender
Over the years, people have stood in front of my paintings and become emotional. Some have cried. Some have felt something they could not immediately name. I believe — and I believe it fully — that this happens because certain pieces carry the energy of the state in which they were made.
Presence is not invisible. It leaves a trace in the work.
When I overthink a painting, I can feel the difference immediately. The work becomes safer. More controlled. Less alive. It may be technically competent, but something essential is missing. That aliveness, that charge, comes from freedom and trust — not from careful management.
I think of making art as a spiritual practice, because truly creative work comes from silence.
Silence, to me, is not the absence of sound. It is the dropping of the constant activity of the mind. It is entering a deeper state of awareness where you are no longer the one doing the deciding. The hand moves. The color lands. And you watch it happen, present but not controlling.
The pieces that feel most meaningful to me are the ones made from that place. Not from cleverness. Not from a concept I was trying to execute. But from presence, freedom, and trust.
That is what I bring to the studio. That is what I hope you feel when you stand in front of the work.
Haleh Mashian is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist and the founder of MASH Gallery. Her work explores material, energy, and the living moment through mixed media painting.
