From there to here, and beyond

I attended a day-long retreat this week where I enjoyed the gift of spacious silence for reflecting on my creative path—how I got here and where I'm headed. I created this sketchbook spread:

I also made an aspiration card that sums up many of my life principles. You can see it on the Bent Tuba Studio blog.

Rest is not the opposite of action.

Photo by shikeroku (used under Creative Commons license)

Sometimes my fallow periods are filled with resistance: I want something specific to happen and it's just not happening (yet), leading me to recognize that things are still germinating. At other times, lying fallow is a deliberate choice that I make.

Six months ago I received two devastating pieces of news within a few days of each other, and the nature of my circumstances led me to choose rest as the best course of action. It's as if I were lucky enough to walk away intact from a train wreck, and rather than immediately searching for another train heading toward my original destination, I decided to just walk for a while and take in the landscape. To slow down, serve in a smaller way for a while, and discern the shape of things.

Though I've been at peace with my decision, reading this post by Alana Sheeren on practicing self-care led me to an epiphany: Rest is not the opposite of action.

Alana writes: "The revelation that has come this past week is that inspired action and slowing down aren’t mutually exclusive if I let go of the thought that I need to be there now. I can get more sleep and spread the word about the pregnancy loss support group I’m starting. I can meditate and journal and answer my emails. But I can only do this if I truly let go and trust that there is time."

These words sparked an insight for me: If "inspired action and slowing down aren't mutually exclusive," then rest contains elements of action, and action CAN include elements of rest.

I've always seen it as rest versus action, as if the two can only be at odds. But if there is action that happens within a state of rest, then rest isn't just restorative (taking you back to where you were before) but also transformative (bringing you into a new landscape entirely). And if there can be places of rest within a state of action, then that changes the game entirely, doesn't it? What if restorative transformation can happen all along the way? What if there's a deep breath available with every step?

Metamorphosis

I created this mixed media collage/assemblage, titled Metamorphosis, to donate to the "Art Lives Here" silent auction fundraiser for Hirsch Wellness Network, which provides creativity workshops to cancer survivors and caregivers. This piece is a diptych that incorporates tea and coffee stains, vintage pattern paper, ink, image transfer, magazine collage elements, and found objects.

A few detail views:

Some of the other art works to be featured can be previewed at the "Art Lives Here" auction Flickr page. Check out Hirsch's Facebook page for auction details.

On the creative process

1.  "Just being at the piano – egoless – is to reach that place where the only thing that exists is the sound and moving toward the sound. The music on the page that was outside of you is now within you, and moves through you; you are a channel for the music, and play from the center of your being. Everything that you have consciously learned, all of your knowledge, emanates from within you... You are at one with yourself and the act, and feel as if the playing has already happened and you are effortlessly releasing it. The music is in your hands, in the air, in the room, the music is everywhere, and the whole universe is contained in the experience of playing." [Mildred Chase]

2.  "We create together with our materials and our bodies, not just from our minds... When I move freely from my body and other senses, the materials will respond." [Shaun McNiff]

3.  "I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another." [Brenda Euland]

Sketching mindfulness.

I started a new sketchbook. A record of liminal space.

Making marks   /   old friends in a new space: seeds and mandalas.

Finding one thing to love in a place I don't want to be: crooked lamp in a waiting room.

Seeing the sky: clouds.

A breath, and a breath, and a breath. That's what I know.

Scenes from the studio.

I love, love, love having a studio space again. This one is finally really starting to feel like home, and I look forward every weekend to my studio time and the corresponding (almost physical) act of stepping back into my artist identity.

The following are photos of some goodies that live in the studio now, after last weekend's field trip to The Scrap Exchange in Durham, NC. Round things and cylindrical things and fabric/wallpaper/paper samples...

These old friends, which have been packed away since I last had my own studio space five years ago, found a home on my work table today:

And here is a snapshot of the middle section of my inspiration board:

And finally, instigated by Carla Sonheim's book Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists, a page of cat doodles.

Postcard exchange: Everyday mandalas

Here are just a few of the 25 art postcards I've made for the international postcard exchange hosted by Art Therapy Without Borders. All made with love and delight in my new studio space.

My weekday schedule has become very busy now that I'm being supervised for my counseling license and art therapy registration, and Saturdays in the studio are a touchstone for me. Now that the postcard exchange is coming to a close, I'm feeling pulled to return to the SoulCollage deck I started about three years ago--but the beauty of a dedicated studio space is the ability to work on more than one project at once.

On being enough.

Lately I've been experimenting with what I think of as everyday mandalas. I created this one, called Heart Mandala, to accompany my guest post at Tracey Clark's I Am Enough blog.

Or is it more?

I'm keeping a visual journal as a form of professional processing. This is what showed up this week.

is this my same broken-open heart

or is it more?

more broken

more open

It's an echo of process work I was doing in 2007 during my first year of graduate school. Which, in its turn, was a continuation of unfinished work from my undergraduate thesis the previous year. Artistic process, like life experience, can be a spiral in which we encounter a theme again and again, but always at a richer level.

Be your own lifeboat.

I began this blog nearly two years ago, in a place of transition and unknowns, just before graduating from my master's program in Colorado and moving 2000 miles back to the Southeast. For the past 18 months since the move, I've struggled to maintain my artistic and professional identity while volunteering, networking, and holding peripheral part-time jobs. But this New Year has brought me the gift of a new full-time position, and for the next few months I'll be enjoying a different kind of transition as I learn to effectively serve at-risk youth and their families as an intensive in-home counselor.

The drawing shown above, titled "Self-Portrait with Water Wings," is a reminder that I have everything I need to stay afloat. (Look for this image in Patti Digh's book What I Wish For You, due out this spring.) As I begin this new professional challenge, I'm making a commitment to an ongoing practice of artmaking for self-care and spiritual reconnection.

Here's hoping that the New Year fairy will leave something nice under your pillow, too. 

Reverb10: Letting Go

This month I'm participating in Reverb10 with creative responses to daily prompts as a reflection on the year.  I'll be including some of my written and/or art responses here.

Today's prompt: What (or whom) did you let go of this year?

I can't seem to find the answer to this question. Is there one answer? Is there a concrete list of things I've let go of in 2010? I think maybe this is such a difficult question for me because I never feel like I truly, permanently let go of anything. Every person to whom I've ever said goodbye, whether by choice or unexpectedly, has left an imprint on my heart. Every lesson or awareness that comes from growth has altered my relationship with something, yet still I cycle through these lessons again and again, if perhaps with a deeper or wider learning each time.

I could make a list of things that I wish I had truly let go of this year, that I want to be done with abruptly instead of gradually. I could describe in great detail what I've been grasping onto repeatedly. But letting go? That's like breathing out. It's only one part of the dance.

Wanna play? Find out more at the Reverb10 website or follow along on Twitter with the #reverb10 hashtag.

How can I keep from singing?

It sometimes happens that when I have a strong drive to express something, it seems impossible to name or describe that thing. Or vision, feeling, experience... I don't even have the right word to categorize its very thingness. I can't tell you, with words, what the above image (a sketchbook spread using oil pastel, watercolor, and Sharpie) is about. But when I look at the image, it distills the essence of something I am deeply in touch with right now.

The past couple of weeks have brimmed with connections, potential, joy, and curiosity. And I don't know what else to say about that. In my journal lately, all I can do is make visual marks and make lists; sentences and paragraphs just aren't forming. And that's okay. I'm always a writer, and always an artist, and always a musician, but what I keep discovering is that at any given moment, one of those creative selves is primary and the others recede--and they all support each other.

Among all the intangible experience of recent days, here are the links to some virtual gifts that have arrived in my awareness this week:

Jen Louden's kick-in-the-pants manifesto about following your calling, a.k.a. the thing you want so bad you can barely stand to think about it because there are a thousand reasons you can't possibly walk that path: Holy Selfishness

Meditative artwork by my mentor, Adele Wayman. The images on her website cannot do justice to the visceral gorgeousness of her installations viewed in person, but go take a look anyway. Her art conveys so much about mindfulness that can't be explained with words.

My friend Melanie Weidner, a Quaker artist and spiritual director, is offering a 5-week online course called Creative Spark: Advent Meditations for Creativity and Community, and at an insanely low price. She's wonderful. Please support her if you can.

And Havi's blog post about safe rooms, which is bursting with a lot of really useful stuff as always, offered exactly the thing I needed to hear today: the bit about the V formation. Maybe you'll find it useful, too.

Meantime.

This time last year, I was ruminating about how I'm always surprised by the advent of autumn and all of its emotional connotations. Now, although many of the small details have shifted in a year's time, none of the big questions have been resolved. I guess there's a reason that Rilke's letter about loving the questions themselves is quoted so often.

So here's my meantime: I'm teaching art to kids. I'm a freelance writer. I've signed up to participate in the International Postcard Art Exchange with other art therapists who support Art Therapy Without Borders. My partner and I have re-launched the Defabricate Etsy store, featuring handmade baby gifts, mini quilts, ornaments, coffee cozies, and (as of this week) cat toys. (I stitched up a feline mascot, shown above, for the cat toy packaging.) And bit by bit, I'm making marks in my personal mini-journals.

Doing it all breath by breath, as always.

Small and simple: ATCs on a theme

Here are the ATCs I created for the Art Therapy Alliance swap, "Collage Unleashed." Each of my four ATCs features the use of tissue-thin paper from an unwanted sewing pattern. Each card focuses on a variation of a personal theme: awareness of emotional patterns.

   Old Brick Road / New View  

   Resting in Uncertainty  

   Underneath Doing is Being  

At the End of the World is a New World

Check out the full album of ATCs for this swap to see what other art therapists have done in response to the "Collage Unleashed" theme.

Keeping it small and simple

I've been making scrap mini-journals, inspired by this series of posts by Lisa Sonora Beam. We had a box of collage ephemera left over from a recent creativity workshop, and it's been a thrill to juxtapose these ragtag materials in booklet form.

My mini-journals use paper (and paper-like) scraps about 7.5" x 4.5", stacked, folded, and stapled. (They could be larger or smaller, depending on what you have on hand. It might be fun to make tiny ones.) They can be used as-is for journal writing or other notebook functions, but they also have the potential to be further altered and embellished.

In other small-and-simple news, I joined an ATC swap sponsored by the Materials and Media subgroup of the Art Therapy Alliance at LinkedIn. ATCs (artist trading cards) are very small, approximately 2.5" x 3.5", and I wasn't sure I would enjoy creating images on such a tiny canvas. As it turns out, I love it. I like the challenge of making an image simple enough to be expressive in such a small space, but without compromising on the subtle layers and textures that are my favorite part of the art process. I'll be sharing my finished ATCs soon. Meanwhile, you can take a peek at the ATCs already submitted for this swap, courtesy of organizer Melanie Glassey and sponsor Art Therapy Without Borders.


If you try your hand at ATCs or scrap mini-journals, I'd love to see or hear about them in the comments!

I feel more human when I play.

All my work is in progress

This is a dreamcatcher I'm making. It's a work in progress.

I've started and not-yet-finished several art objects in the past few months. This tends to be the way I work as an artist: an organic start-and-stop, shift-and-reshift of focus, letting things marinate. I have complicated long-term relationships with what I'm creating. Very often this seems to echo the gestation of a human infant. There's a conception event, several months of development (physical, mind-spirit, or some of each), followed eventually by the midwifing of a physical presence in the world that was not there before.

A list of projects that are in various stages of gestation at the moment: A series of stitched mandalas in hoops. Several essays. A new interest in jewelry-making, from the perspective of amulets or talismans. Collage work in an old planner.

Less tangible things that are also, always, works in progress: My job search. My professional identity. My creative and personal self-understanding. And, weaving in and out of all of these, my efforts at maitri (compassion for oneself).

All my work is in progress.

What are you working on? Or, put another way: What's working on you?

To-day I Am On Bird Time.

bird time by verdissage on Polyvore.com

I start my mornings with a cup of coffee and a notebook, writing morning pages on the sun porch. Most mornings the trees just outside the windows are filled with a variety of birds, who move quickly beyond the canopy of green leaves and can be tracked only by their songs. They call to each other as if that singing is the most vital and immediate action the world needs in this moment.


Watching birds go about their business, the vital right-now business of perching in trees and searching for food and communicating with other birds, changes my relationship with time. Bird Time is right now, neither fast nor slow, just exactly what it is. On Bird Time, I find myself: mind and body and spirit, right now, just as I am.


I've been wanting to write something here about mindfulness. It's relevant to my art process, my art therapy training, and my everyday experience. It has utterly changed my relationship with myself. And it's hard for me to write about.


So what is mindfulness exactly? And what isn't it? Is it a thing you do (technique) or a way to be (perspective)? And what's the point of all this?


After three years of mindfulness training (as a foundation of my graduate school coursework), I have a pretty good sense of what mindfulness means to me. But it is very much a sense--a visceral understanding, a somatic knowing. Like the classic example of riding a bicycle, it's stored in muscle memory. It's difficult to translate the fullness of that visceral sense into words. I find myself stumbling vaguely around the concept, saying only that it's about what I notice, what I'm aware that I know and don't know: my relationship with Self in every new moment.


Other people have created fabulous explanations and definitions and examples of mindfulness. I'll link to some of them in a moment. For now, the closest I can come to describing my relationship with mindfulness is this: it's like being on Bird Time.


It's not just birds who are inherently present-centered, of course. So are all wild creatures, mammals and fish and insects. So are dogs and cats. So are young human children.


Birds don't live in the future: they're not making a mental grocery list or wondering how the weather will be for migrating next season. They don't live in the past: no ruminating on regrets or perceived slights. Birds are fully embodied in present action, vibrantly alive in the now.


And sometimes, when I slow down and listen, so am I.




Five views on mindfulness:


Havi Brooks on harbor seals


Jen Louden on sensation (not more effort)


Cathy Malchiodi on mindfulness and the creative spirit


Sparky Firepants on blauthenticity


Carrie Newcomer on letting it be

Retrospective: Transformed by Touch

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long exploration of spirituality through making art.


Over and over when the world offers itself
to us for our awakening, all we have to do is meet it.
–Jack Kornfield


While working on The Direct Experience of God, I became enchanted with fingerprints. I pressed my inked fingers against white paper, marveling in the variation that could occur in multiple prints from the same finger because of how the ink lay differently on the finger’s surface each time. One fingerprint in particular struck me as beautiful. I used a photocopier to blow it up to 200 times its original size. The resulting print, an intriguing visual, hung in my studio for weeks.


In March, ready to begin a new piece, I come back to the fingerprint. What if it were even bigger? I take it to a copy shop and have the large print blown up even more, so that the fingerprint is now the size of my forearm from fingertip to elbow. I sense that this piece needs to remain simple because the fingerprint itself is already so complex. One fingerprint from one individual, and yet it contains multitudes. After a failed experiment with transferring the print onto a piece of wood using wintergreen oil, I decide to simply use the huge photocopy itself. I glue it to a piece of wood. A friend with power tools cuts around the perimeter of the fingerprint so that the shape of the wood becomes the shape of the print itself.


Pondering my next move, I am toying with the idea of building up the lines of the fingerprint dimensionally using the text-and-binder method from The Direct Experience of God. But it doesn’t feel right. Remembering my intention to keep it simple, I decide to enhance the dark lines of the fingerprint with black ink to heighten the contrast between fingerprint and paper. I do this work slowly, on the floor, with a bottle of ink and a fine-tipped brush. Like the stitching I have used in previous pieces, the inking process is deliberate and meditative. I become immersed in the careful process of filling in tiny dark areas with ink to make them darker. During this process it occurs to me that my fingerprint is both unique, because there is no other exactly like it in the world, and universal, because a fingerprint is an instantly recognizable image. Fingerprints manage somehow to be universal symbols of uniqueness.


My fingerprint, now startlingly large and visually bold, makes a statement about the uniqueness of every single one of the billions of individuals currently alive on this planet. We lose sight of that so easily. I remember Annie Dillard’s description of the struggle to comprehend the complexity of all of the individual lives inherent in large numbers of people. Referring to the 1991 death of 138,000 people in Bangladesh, she writes, “I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning. ‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. ‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’” We cannot comprehend the specific and the abstract at the same time. But I want to attempt to convey this idea nonetheless.


During the creation of this piece, I have been collecting black walnut seeds from the grassy area outside my basement studio. I don’t know why, but I’m drawn to them. They’re huge, just the right size to fit in my palm with my fingers wrapped tightly around the seed. The pattern of lines on their outer shells reminds me of my fingerprint.


Because the fingerprint itself is so simple, I need something more to the piece, an altar of sorts to hang just beneath it. In the final exhibition, there will be a shelf, collaged with teastained text, which will hold a small pile of these walnut seeds.

Interspersed with the seeds will be strips of stained text. The text for both the shelf and the strips comes from Jack Kornfield’s book A Path with Heart, specifically from a chapter titled “Enlightenment is Intimacy with All Beings.” Kornfield proposes that “mindful awareness is itself an act of profound intimacy… [which] is both the beginning and the culmination of spiritual practice.”

It is only through intimate relationships with other humans that we can begin to comprehend the enormity of multitudes of complex human creatures co-existing on Earth. And indeed, it may only be through human relationships that we can recognize the presence of God. Pema Chodron remarks that taking the bodhisattva vow is equivalent to declaring oneself not afraid of other people. I interpret this in my own experience to mean that we must be willing to love and be loved in order to know God.

Chödrön defines the kalyanamitra, or spiritual friend, as someone who makes us see ourselves clearly and honestly, an inspiration to stay on the path. Spiritual friendship can be the primary basis for the understanding of the divine.


Ruminating on the unique and the universal, on spiritual friendship, and on the human urge to make one’s mark upon the universe, I decide to call this piece Touch.

Process: How It All Unfolds

I sometimes describe myself as a process-oriented artist. To me, that means that I value the path of artistic creation as much as the finished work of art. I view artistic process as a sacred relationship between me and the materials--a relationship that continues to develop even after the artwork is “completed.”


Being process-oriented, for me, also indicates that I am continually open to the unexpected. My art usually begins with some particular image or question, but I never know how it may shift and change on its journey toward fullness.


One thing I've noticed about my process over the past few years is that at least half of it happens outside of the studio. (By “studio” I mean any dedicated space, physical or temporal, where one does the tangible work of making art. At the moment my studio is a portable 12” x 12” box of collage materials.) I love the part of the process that is hands-on and messy and in direct relationship with the physical materials, but I also value the intangible stuff that happens outside of that space.


Studio time is expressive time: making, giving voice, giving form. Outside-the-studio process is often receptive: not giving, but receiving. Sometimes this means simply noticing what thrills me, calls me, makes me curious. It could be a particular color that makes my heart sing, or a found object. It could be a line of poetry or the musical bridge of a song. It could take the form of ideas, materials, sensation, or conversations. Receiving can mean soaking in new information and experiences, letting them sift and settle among the inner layers. A connection may emerge: two unrelated pieces of data, juxtaposed, suddenly make sense.

Need a creative jump-start?


• Try changing your perspective, literally: Strategic planning is for the birds


• Take ten minutes for a creative practice.


• Consider: What are you hatching?




Share in the comments: What do you know, or notice, about your own creative process?