process class letter

Let's go deep this winter
through the dark
to the source of light.

“I sometimes think of the critic as a character left over from caveman times, times concerned with sheer survival. The critic hunches at the edge of the clearing and watches for dangerous intruders. If we send in an original thought, that thought is often shooed away. To the critic, an original thought may appear disturbing, even dangerous. It wants to see what it has seen before. To the critic, ease feels foreign -- and suspicious. Work should be work, shouldn’t it? The critic believes in product, not process. It does not like us to have the joy of creation, It is interested in fixing things, not in creating things. It insists there must always be something to fix.”

Those words of Julia Cameron have been keeping me company in the past weeks.



How do we create something new?
How do we meet that critic while we are in process?
I don’t know what do do about it other than feeling its effect on my heart. Feeling the shutting down of free play, of following a color or shape in trust.
How do we develop trust in the process, to really allow ourselves to paint freely without trying to develop our skill in painting?
Trying to undo the effort to be free creates more effort.

Can we stop long enough to feel what it is like to stand at the edge of the unknown, paint brush in hand, and carefully make one mark?
Can we allow that mark to be free to show us the way further into this pulsing moment of our lives?



We need those original thoughts more than ever before.

Let’s practice allowing them to take form in paint.

Let’s look at life together and paint it.

The joy of creation can dispel what is untrue and powerless.



The world needs creative human beings who trust in what has never been seen before.


That’s what I think, sitting here on my knoll in the wintering woods of Rappahannock County.



We will meet again to paint in January at Mullany Art Studios.

Saturday and Sunday January 28/29

9:30 am - noon

$90.



Due to the extra effort to make the room warm and inviting in the winter, we are setting the minimum participation at four painters.



I hope you’ll join us.
We inspire and support one another to let process rather than product lead the way - in our own unique way.

Barbara