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.
As I am watching somebody carve slashes into a piece of wood, I am thinking of wounding, as is she. After cutting the slashes the way that she wants them, she is now painting the wood gold, and rapping the wood/wound with black and gold thread. She is acknowledging the wound, and how hurt she feels. However, instead of leaving it at that, she is doing repair work. She is acknowledging the hurt and making something of beauty out of it. This rings of alchemy. Taking a heavy feeling and allowing the alchemical process, which involves holding and letting the hurt be, and, after some cooking in the vessel of transformation, helping it have another life. Gold, especially, is the goal in alchemy, the end of the process. By painting her wood/wound gold, this person is stating something like: “I have let myself feel, and I have now come through to the other side of the pain.”
A participant in an Intuitive Painting group writes” Painting like this provides an opening. What was once closed, blocked, or neglected begins to breathe again. The breath of new life moving through me and extending again beyond the studio space. I become more and more in touch with myself and what is natural and authentic, bringing about greater awareness in my everyday life and rendering a greater sense of gratitude for what is.”
A client, the oldest of three daughters, has been raised to be forthright, responsible, and somewhat rigid. Having not rebelled against that as a teenager, her time is ripe to now. However, now in her late 20′s, she does not seek to be wild and crazy, but to be be more open, spontaneous, and natural. As we work with her images, she creates an upside down, flying and falling through the air figure. We look at this figure together, sensing that, although she is not “going anywhere,” she is surely enjoying the fall! The not-going- somewhere is an antidote to the masculine drive to accomplish something. This is a very valuable place, as it relaxes us and opens us up to what is organic in us. We learn what we really like, dislike, and need, as opposed to what the culture has prescribed us to need.
The transition that this client is in creates a state of unknowing. When we move to the known into the unknown, it is important to have patience while we shed the old ways of thinking about ourselves.
