I met with a friend last night who is a sculptor. Her interest is in making molds of birds that are endangered, especially of vultures.
Last night she told me a story. She was watching a PBS special on vultures in Africa. A woman was being interviewed that runs a sanctuary in Africa. My friend was riveted. After watching the show, she went online and got information about where this sanctuary was , and who to contact. She went online and began a correspondence with the woman who runs this place. To make a long story short, my friend has bought her ticket to Africa. She will be molding vultures, eagles, and perhaps other birds that are being saved especially for her.
My friend trusted her intuition, took action, and a large risk. She followed her passion up to the very last detail. It takes alot of courage to do this.
What is calling to you? Where do you need to trust and act? What will you do, as Mary Oliver states, with your one precious and wild life?
One of the things that makes art-making so healing is that we “forget” to think about ourselves! Art-making, bringing attention to images, takes the focus off of our usual self-obsession. This is usually felt as a gigantic relief. Hours go by, and where have we been? We don’t know, we’ve been so immersed, that we’ve been outside of time as we know it. The “I”, with it’s usually constant self-reflection, doubt, worry, and just plain imagining the future, slows down, and with it, thoughts slow down, too. I believe that it is this slowing down, and caring or paying attention to something else besides the contents of our thinking, that gives us a cool drink of water, a pleasant refresher.
When talking about image-making and images with a friend over tea, I admitted that I don’t look for meaning when I make my art. How ironic we laughed that, as an art therapist, I keep quiet when it comes to my own work. My friend said that she understands this. She stated, “We as artists are usually the keeper of the secrets.” Ah, I liked that term immediately. How fun words can be to play with!
We are such keepers of the secrets, I stated, and sometimes, we don’t even know what secrets we’re keeping. Perhaps the art itself plays hide and seek with us., sometimes revealing itself fully, sometimes not. Whatever the case, though, we hold as sacred both what we know, and what we don’t, just being pleased and honored to keep the mystery and aliveness of the images close by.
This fall, I approached an intuitive painting class with some trepidation. After laboring over the first painting I presented my work to one of my mentors, an art therapist, for comment. She asked me what I felt it needed. I was blank. We turned it up-side-down. Again I was blank. She then asked if the image was precious and I replied that it did feel that way. At that point she suggested I paint over the image and keep working. For a moment, I froze. It’s not that the painting was good—it was that I was afraid I couldn’t do better or even more. I was amazed that I actually had to draw on some courage to proceed and yet I knew if I did it would be a breakthrough for me. I remembered seeing Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film, The Mystery of Picasso (Le Mystère Picasso), which shows Picasso painting and repainting image after image. Out of the hundreds of reworks there were probably innumerable masterpieces that were simply painted over. He seems to be playing with all the possibilities–to let go of the ‘preciousness’ in any one particular image and keep exploring until the image that speaks to him emerges. This memory opened the way to proceed so I grabbed a large brush and began to apply large swaths of paint to the paper. What emerged and morphed from one painting into another were a series of exploding volcanoes. I painted the molten veins beneath the volcano, I expanded the explosion onto another sheet of paper, added a starry night, some lightening, a trickster coyote, a tree with its roots deep in the dark earth, which finally became a woman’s back with her spine exposed. Upon stepping back from this series I understood most of the symbolism but I realized I had only scratched the surface when a friend commented that the explosions looked like pain. I was thinking emotional pain but he had meant physical pain. Then it hit me that I had been painting the chronic shoulder pain I’ve been experiencing since an accident last winter. I’ll be working with these particular images for some time to come yet I am willing to let them become something else.
When we practice Intuitive Painting in the studio, there is a relief from meaning that takes place. We don’t ask, as we do in a therapeutic session, what does this painting mean, what story does it tell. We, instead, follow the thread of the painting, step by step, as it reveals itself to us. We are so psychologically sophisticated in this culture. We tell our stories constantly, even publicly on television. To practice something like Intuitive or process painting, or it can happen in other practices as well,is to have a break from interpretation. Ah, a breath of fresh air is what it can feel like. Just being in a dialogue with the painting, following it as it lets us know what it needs, is a practice that helps us to be present in the Now, with ourselves and it.
