The Energetic Juice of Art

Creating art is not dissimilar to back packing in the wilderness.

One goes to the location, finds the trail head, starts up the trail, exerts a lot of energy, rethinks a trajectory or two, and discovers many amazing (or disturbing) things about oneself and about the world around them. A more experienced hiker might add the spice of history, philosophy, biology, and even spirituality to the journey.

Thusly thought, art making can be considered cleansing, invigorating ... and perhaps quite foolish, depending on the weather.

In other words. Life at its best!

Sketching a Feeling

She's now 22 years of age, and lives across the nation from me, but my arms still remember embracing the totality of her being. Lucky am I to have this sketch. Luckier am I that she responds to my physical touch still. Luckiest am I that she has the kind of mind that can read my art well.

Resonating connection between humans is not to be taken for granted, ever, regardless of whether one is blood relation or not. Some of my best embraces have been with fleet footed escape artists.

Audience Participation

Yesterday I met with two women. The first looked at the lines in my face and wanted to talk about my ills and pains. The second looked at the same lines and wanted to talk about the healthy wisdom behind my expressions.  It's time to pull out Ballerina Girl, the heroine of my life. She can perform the same dance with exquisite grace night after night, but it will never be the same ~ the audience is just as much a part of the dance as she is, influencing the air with unique stories of youth and age.

Vortex or Helix?

Make this tiny painting more interesting by clicking on it and stretching the enlargement the width of your screen. Inspired in part by memories of walking in the underbrush near the bridge at Little Sur River (Big Sur) when I was a kid. Later, when I was a teenager, this area was bulldozed to thwart hippy encampments. I rode the school bus past twice a day, mourning the loss of such richness. The scar lasted for years but thankfully the brush-trees have grown back. No trespassing allowed, though, so I had to paint it to live it again.

Changing Perspective

I mentioned before that I painted this work while almost on remote control due to distracted concentration. This means I keep finding things out about it now that I wasn't aware of when in my creative mode. Today I finally figured out what that rock-like shape in the center of the painting might be.

One of the best aspects of somewhat abstract drawing is the viewer's imagination can use the images like maps of personal discovery.

The above painting emerged from somewhere thoughtful, regardless of the bogus clarity of my mind while painting it. I've always admired the following artist, and I am deducing that my life has finally given me enough experiential information/maturing to travel closer to a Bosch understanding.

Hieronymous Bosch was a master at making the viewer squirm by creating frightening organic forms out of abstracted shapes. I am not that bold, but I see successful attempts by young artists all across the internet these days. The image below makes one wonder how close the Bosch past and the freakish present really are.

Hieronymous Bosch "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (Detail)

So Bright it Has to Be Black and White

Long ago I tried to paint a portrait of this woman but her colorful eyes glowed so brightly I knew I'd never be satisfied with any type of capture I achieved.

I compromised by cutting away all the color... making this a black and white image.

Years later, by complete coincidence my husband and I rent from this woman's brother. He has a smile that when fully charged beams with similar beauty. Last year I drew a cartoon of it, along with the long-tounged grin of his dog, Lucky, and sent the drawing to a friend who had cancer. The imp in me is sure those grins were a big part of her healing.

(Click on image to see my attempt at Lena's eyes.)

Soft and Hard

Red Rose Green Girl

Here is a quick sketch from just 

before I began painting circular abstract art.

World concern plays with personal insight.

Creative Growth

Forest Dream (Private Collection)

No matter how young or old we are/become,
balance comes when we take a break from it all.

I have been listening to cherry bombs exploding in the night,
watching storm petrals fly ominously close to the water.

One can dip the brush in black paint or red.
One can dip the brush in green.
One can hibernate and hope the dreams are full spectrum.

It is easy to be too small or too big,
It is far more difficult to be comfortable
in the company of shrinkage and bigness in others.
How to paint this?

Lessons Larger than a Sandcastle

I know someone who spent much of his senior high school year at the beach, skipping morning classes that bored him. He'd build up sand castle kingdoms and watch the water destroy them, over and over and over. Most parents and administrators these days would cringe at such delinquency, forgetting to look at the motivations and lessons being learned.

The creative spirit in this boy is what has balanced the man he became... into decades of success in our sterile and often cold business world.

Happy Birthday to the Sandcastle Builder

What a circus this world is! 

Note to self: support the humor inside a true friend.

(click on image)

Pleasure Traveling Through Creativity

"Vista III (Blue Mist)" Private Collection

One of the delights of painting abstract landscapes is in the travel. 

When I painted the shapes into this painting I physically sat in my studio at my easel, creating without a pre-plan other than artful discovery. In my mind, and as I worked, I was soon under that sky, scanning that vista, feeling the wind, searching for soaring birds, wondering if I would see a rodent under the brush I'd just discovered. I puzzled about whether the climate unfolding before me was bitterly cold and perhaps too dry for life all year around, or was this merely a winter's seasonal scene.

I am told* human brains create pleasure chemicals when we do the following activities:

Play, Care, Search

Creating art can secrete all three. Healthy PCS (picks).

*Info provided by Carol S.

A Final View

I was asked if my art was self expression. She assumed I would paint in dark colors if I was in a dark mood, or in light colors if I was in a light mood.

Since I am in a mood to explain...

Above is a portrait of the dying months of an elderly woman, as I perceived she was experiencing the world through hearing/seeing the thoughts and emotions she expressed to me. I lived with this woman during her last 7 months, not so much as her health provider ~ more as the resident comic relief.

Oxygen was not entering her brain fully during these months so her thoughts often drifted into dementia. She came up with the most astonishingly surrealistic verbal imagery during these times. At other times she was completely lucid and enjoyed a good reminisce or ponder of what the future might bring. She was a world traveler who adored history and would hold forth with great aesthetic movement of hand and turn of vocal phrase. The fact that she was the daughter of European peasantry and was raised in the wealthiest town in America colored her points of view. She had embraced both life and death in her professional career. She helped hundreds of people become their better selves.

I painted this portrait immediately after she died. Yes, there is my own expressive self in the piece. The colors are my own choice (the colors of her bedroom walls and garden outside), as are the specific images (symbols, really). But this is a portrait of what I had seen happen in someone else's life. In other words, if I had painted a lemon that I set on a table next to my canvas, and the painted image looked like a lemon to you, you'd think lemon. You wouldn't ask me if I was being self expressive. Likewise, if you had been in the house with me as I lived with this dying woman for 7 months, you might look at this painting and think: dying woman. Our society recognizes that portraits can be of what we see on the outside. Less obvious are the many portraits out there which are about what it is to think/feel on the inside.

As soon as this piece was publicly exhibited it was snapped up by a collector who recognized the nature of the portrait .

If you click on the image you might be able to see the tiniest vignettes within the larger picture. This is a woman going over all of her memories, rereading a thousand books, questioning too many of her own assumptions, and letting go of a hundred dreams. Her final view.

Building from the Past a Future

Temple ~ 3 Wise and a Clown

(Needs clicking to Perceive)

"Explain this painting," he said. 

I preferred not to explain, but I did, because his needing to have the painting explained is relevant. When I look at this painting I see a young woman with gaudy eye make up and innocent pink lip stick. She wears many veils, symbols of hiding or trying on new identities. There are surrounding shapes that might represent sow bugs or pupas, representing hiding and transition into something new. Above is an organic form that has released its seeds, seeds of thought. To the left, hidden behind a transparent splash, is a clawed hand: danger/fear. She appears to be standing in front of another person, or perhaps this is another aspect of herself or who she hopes to be. I explained that this is a portrait of a teenager, about 16 years old, confused by her hormones.

My visitor looked down at me, "Couldn't you paint your symbolism more specifically? You had to explain this to me and a good painting explains itself."

Exactly, I said. You felt confused and annoyed by how the painting didn't explain itself to you easily. Without my explanation you were the girl looking in the mirror. You had no idea what was going on. You could have figured it out if you paid attention, but what teenager wants to do that? Now I've explained a little, so the world makes more sense, but I bet, as any teenager would, you wish you could have figured it all out on your own.

Here is another portrait of female adolescence, a teen in transition. Both were painted when my daughter was high school aged, but they are not portraits of her, specifically.

Moving Forward Regardless

"Women Attracting Wisdom"

5" x 5"

At the edge of loss we find wisdom.

On exhibit at the Pacific Art League, Palo Alto, during April. (Red dot)

"Fantasy" Based on Reality?

"Embrace"

I am putting this image back up because I just had an "A-hah!" about how I created the movement of lines. This most recent of my oils was painted while I was battling a baffling combination of illnesses. Needless to say, my mind was not completely present to the needs of the painting. I was almost on automatic pilot, sorting out color puzzles and tonal questions, but not addressing content to any real depth. There's clearly a message here, but I was mostly just concerned about wanting the piece to emerge away from the raw sense of despair that it had had when I first began creating it. (That bottom area of the painting had originally been quite brutal!) When the painting claimed itself finished I stared at it as if it were a stranger, wired the back, and hung it on the wall in preparation for the next surge of visitors to the studio.

This work received a lot of attention from the incoming crowds. There was a lot of speculation about what was what, and parents enjoyed explaining to their children the images and stories they saw in the piece. The feel of inflowing lines intrigued a few and one person wondered where the idea to paint that movement came from. At the time I just shrugged, having no clear idea. This morning I found the answer.

Every morning for the past two years I've walked for about an hour, usually to the top of a steep hill. While I was ill I couldn't make it up to the crest, but today I managed the full hike again.

This walk is vigorous, and gets the blood surging. I'd been in a habit of reaching the top, stopping and turning my face immediately to the sun, and shutting my eyes. I had noticed that if I looked at what I saw inside my eyes at that moment (the expected red and yellow colors) I'd also see a lot of movement. I have no idea if its blood surging or eyes focusing or what, but it's fascinating to experience. The movement tends to start at the center of my vision arena and move with flowing motion towards the outer sides. There'd be a pause, and then the colored movement would immediately surge quickly back inward towards the center. Soon the movement would slow down and freeze into normal static color patterns. This approximately 8 second sensation is a bizarre thing to experience so I had my husband try it out to make sure it was a common biological phenomena. He made sure to climb the hill energetically before he stopped and, with his eyes closed, stared at the sun. He had the same experience as me.

After doing this hike and tiny meditation this morning for the first time in months I had my "A-hah!" I saw that there were also little spots of color and light that twinkled through the red and yellow as it moved, and here is where I recognized the basis for the imagery in the above painting.

Funny how one can create something and not really know the foundation until much later. If we keep looking at this world, we will see so much. What we learn bubbles up sooner or later, and sometimes it arrives without our being fully aware of where we'd originally taken the information in.

Variety in Work and in Audience

When one creates from a place of individual truth there is a chance that the product will reach a small audience, but not necessarily that of the broad populace.

Visitors to my studio often wonder if more than one artist has created the work on the walls, since my truths have traveled all over the spectrum ~ from representation to abstract, line to color, tiny to quite large, and from the dark side of life to the giddy silliness of life. I am always fascinated to see to which artistic representation of my truths each individual visitor will respond. The general rule is that the many visitors seem to gravitate to just as many different pieces. Below is a selection of the favorite pieces from a recent open studio. Each inspired dynamic conversations between myself and the viewer, or between the visiting couples/groups amongst themselves.

(All of the pieces now have new homes.)

Grounded Inspiration From Within a Chaotic Piece

"Riding Chaos" clearly represents the craziness of the human experience, but is actually grounded in elemental nature. Prior to this work I had spent a lot of time looking underneath shrubbery, into grassy vegetation, through the branches of trees, and on up into the amazingly contrasting blue of the sky. I am fascinated by how organisms shift and bump up against one another, die off, and are reborn.

Originally there was little water in this piece, but bit by bit the blue dropped from the sky, transforming land into lake or sea. Water is a profound symbol of both biological life and powerful grounding (being that life does not exist without water and that condensed water always filters down to the lowest gravitational level.) Consciously or unconsciously knowing this, the viewer perceives the water and is soothed even while viewing the frenetic energy of this chaotic painting.

Inspired by Mistakes

In my work of the past couple of years I have been studying the "fool" and the "Fool," agreeing with Shakespeare that the latter is an enlightened former.  Just now I've come upon a reference to this in "Being Wrong" by Kathryn Schulz. She describes how there is an optimistic model of wrongness whereby one who dives into a foolish endeavor (a mistake) might come out all the wiser in the end. In her words "...erring is vital to any process of invention and creation."

While Schulz is referring to mistakes/learning in every walk of life, I find this model of thinking points directly to the center of quality art. I have always been of the opinion that perfection must include a flaw in order for it to be believable. We flawed humans need to see this flaw of humanity in art if we are to relate with any sense of depth, and true perfection has immense depth.

Striving to create art forms depicting human perfection is a valiant ideal held by most artists. Only a lucky few are able to achieve this goal, and we viewers are lucky indeed to benefit from experiencing these master works of perception and execution. I see these master works in museums, occasionally in galleries and homes, and delightfully and surprisingly, in the instinctive work of very young children.

It takes a bold mind (or is it a fool's mind?) to break honored rules of conduct in order to open up inspiringly fresh and profound worlds of discovery. Many times I have advised myself and others: "use your mistakes ~ you might find yourself in a far more interesting world of thought." It's a messy existence, trusting mistakes to lead one out of the haze-maze towards a hopeful clarity, but oh so deliciously alive is the process.

"Unfolding Bouquet"

This is the recently finished painting that had kids of all ages

pointing and guessing, fully engaged. 5' x 3'