painting the dream

a blog is an ongoing conversation
and what keeps the conversation going?

 curiosity
and discovery
and more curiosity.

I experienced the first time
to feel the need to see the full image.

the image called for another piece of paper.

i have been beginning with full sheets
wanting to open the door to wide expression.

but yesterday i began with a half sheet
and could feel the call for more
when the womb appeared
and the child.

What is this process?
it is calling forth life
like a dream that i am awake to,
i paint the dream.

it all comes back to her

When you let go of control in process painting, anything or anyone can and will show up to join you.

The first time my mom came into the painting I discovered the gift of form. I was feeling a lot of mixed emotions after spending time with my family one summer vacation. My parents are both very elderly. And the fact of life, which is death, loomed large in my awareness.

I began the painting with a large black spiral. Around and around it went in the center of the paper, and so did my emotion, caught in the spiral jetty I had made. When BK came around to see where I was at, having told her I was going to paint my mom, she asked me why I hadn't painted my mother. Not like I was avoiding something.......eh?

As soon as I let my brush paint my mom's face, all the black swirling stopped inside me and I just felt the love I feel for her. From here, the painting continued to take form, keeping me in contact with what I was feeling in relation to my mom, and life and death.

Sometimes I begin a painting from a thread found at the completion of a previous painting. But for now I am glad to have myself to begin with. Any form will touch me. I might as well start close to home.

being human, painting

The gift of painting, free from control, meaning or product making,
coincided with life getting the upper hand.

I've learned to surrender to the creative process called life
by practicing doing what I love to do
and being as honest as I can be,
 with myself.

There is no way around the surrendering part.

But finding a kind way to open to the unknown
is the reason for the smile on any creative person's face.

Being human

is being creative

and being honest

lights the creative fire.

risking failure for the beauty of living

As I painted an abundant and floral field today, an oil painting, I met the voice of the judge as the physical sensation of holding back and being too careful.
This sensation brought me directly into the field of process painting - my body.

listening in process - hearing the judge - taking risks

This has prompted me to write about something I think we all know well.
The judge thinks it has the keys to keep me safe from risk. The risk may take many forms: receiving a negative evaluation of my new work, the risk of failure, the risk of over stretching and snapping the connection with what guides me.
I have been process painting now for a year.  The benefit of taking a risk has been experienced many times, consciously. I have been witnessed and supported in doing so because process painting is not done alone. Taking a risk is like walking through a door that is too narrow for the truth.

Every moment is a doorway.


To paint without controlling the image allows me to connect with the unknown and its inherent life giving energy.

To paint without needing to produce anything is priceless, as it slows me down to sense what is the next true impulse.

To paint without having to burden the experience with meaning is a breath of fresh air for my complex (and wonderful) abstract mind.


Now the question for me is how to continue to paint and exhibit, with these same guidelines.

Here is where I am stepping into new territory.
Here is where I am finding what really matters to me and why I continue to paint, write or speak about the creative process.
Here is where I am following through.

As I painted I suddenly felt that I was afraid to be led into this floral field, not knowing where it would lead. Before process painting, I might have stopped or pushed myself through, without really paying attention to the sensation.

I could feel that I did not know where I was going, a fact of process painting I am very familiar with now.

The unknown is the ground of process painting.

I could feel that I thought I needed to know, if I was going to put this on a gallery wall in a few weeks.
The feeling of wanting to bring black into the field was coming up. I hesitated and listened to all the inner considering that arose.
What if the painting isn’t resolved before it is due to hang on the gallery wall? What if it I fail? What if I ruin it?
Wanting to follow my impulses, I knew I was either walking the gangplank or entering another doorway. All these thoughts were swirling in my head and I dove below them and followed the impulse.
Continuing to follow more impulses, I experienced myself entering the flow of the river in creative intimacy.

I could feel the judge trying to hold me safe from risk.
And it no longer felt like a place I wanted to be painting or living from.

The resulting black marks in later sessions became the invitation for another mark, and although meaning is eschewed in process, I am happy to see what feels and looks like butterfly wings, softly touching into the grasses and blossoming field of myself.



The new paintings in this mini show are recent. Some of you may have visited my studio in River District Arts and saw them last November. But that one painting is inviting me further, past it's first blush of a beautiful impression.
I am willing to risk it’s failure for the experience of painting beyond what I know. It's a little risky to even consider exhibiting again, but I am.

Life is an ever authenticating process 
and I am in process.

I hope the new paintings have a sense of stepping just a bit beyond what is known,
or of leaning inward to listen,
toward what is unknown and beautiful.


If the ground shifts under our feet, it's a call for our senses to sharpen.


Friends, my hallway is filled with large unfinished paintings of trees and fields and of shapes that have no names, from my studio in Germany. There are more paintings of fields and gardens that I have begun recently leaning on the wall in the corner of the living room I call a studio. I study my life everywhere, in all the rooms of the house. It is looking as if my work has begun long ago and all I am invited to do now is to follow through.

I have never known the feeling of really following through with my work as a painter. There has always been someone else to give my loving attention to. There is a satisfaction in this focus that is new to me. And this is where I am now.
I’m not going anywhere, I’m home. I’m not looking for a better place to be.
I have developed a relationship with the unknown that I am beginning to trust.
I have taken risks to know that this trust lies in me.


I could call my mini show The Nature of Risk.
I learn from nature, she is my teacher.
It is late afternoon now, and she is calling me to a walk in the sun.



Be well
and keep your fire tended.
we need it,

Barbara

the touch of mystery

When can I say this all began?
How did I get where I am today?
Who am I?

I love these questions and today I am feeling how they have become my life, how they live with me, how they carry me along into the mystery, day by day, moment by moment.

This morning the mysterious process of creative living was underlined once again by the wise words of Julia Cameron.
Bless her heart. Bless her work. Bless her for writing and listening to her process.

It was her book, The Artist's Way Every Day, that still sits by my morning side, which I read through the fifteen months of my woodland time out. I know that those months are the ground for all I do, now. It was a time of such deep questioning, stopping and listening, and is indeed, how I arrived here. Its mystery is woven into me and is why I can write at all, now, and actually let my words be released, trusting them to be strong enough to fly.

Julia Cameron writes, "Mystery is the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. All too often, when we say we want to be creative, we mean that we want to be productive. Now, to be creative is to be productive -- but by cooperating with the creative process, not forcing it."

"Creativity requires a respectful reticence. The truth is that is how to raise the best ideas. Let them grow in dark and mystery."

Today I am celebrating every step through the "dark and mystery" that brought me here. I feel all my questions and how they have settled down into my body from my mind. I feel all the waiting, all the wondering, all the aching, all the confusion as I faced the mystery and found myself in relation to it.

Today I wanted to acknowledge all the hands that kept taking form in my process painting this past year.

They were reaching to touch me: red hands, black hands, pink hands. 
I was reaching to touch me and they were in service to this longing.

How strong the impulse was that it needed such strong colors! Yes, there were moments of judgement. Oh, the black hands! Oh, the red hands! So dangerous my mind said they were! But over time they no longer carried a story, they carried feeling, only feeling. They were necessary.

Yesterday the hands came again and took on a recently mixed soft pink color and they were my own hands, touching my mother's face and hair. I had begun to paint myself and could not ignore the resemblance to my mother. To allow both these realities is the way I came in touch with myself and what I was feeling. Mother is where my life, with all its needs and joys, began.

The mystery of process will bring more surprise to life through this painting.

I'm so grateful to life and the process that has brought me into such intimate relationship with the mystery.

That mystery has taken the form of many women who have supported me along the way. Most recently those women are Barbara Kaufman, the director of the Center for Creative Exploration and Julie Daley, the creator of Writing Raw and Unabashedly Female. Both these women live, work and play in San Francisco, CA.

I can't say enough about process painting or writing raw.
The mystery can never be fathomed, nor can we.

my new job:
wake up
feed the birds
make tea or coffee
ponder
be inspired
don't even try to fit this into words
write
or paint
do whatever comes first.
love being
such a mystery.

the tenderness of our creative potential

Today my painting felt like flow and I named it as "my flow."
Then when I made a move that I considered not to be in the flow, well, the painting process showed me even more about flow.

The process is the teacher. And oh, am I the student.
The ways of forgetting that are as subtle or as shocking as the ways I remember.

So, here’s the story behind that observation.
I began painting myself on a half sheet which is 20x26 inches.  I had just completed a very large painting 65x40 inches, which I look forward to write about as it held me through some very rough energetic seas and gifted me in the completion with an experience in paint, of the flow of giving and receiving and how they continually dance.

Of how giving becomes receiving and receiving becomes giving. 

It is amazing, to watch that occur and then it disappears into memory. 
It is more than a memory though I couldn’t say what it is, but I was a part of the experience. 
And that is so wonderful, to include oneself in life at the level of creation.


As I painted, I noticed the judgment that I would need to paint the whole figure didn’t land anywhere, nor did the thoughts that I really don’t know if I was doing this right - beginnings can be awkward. The feeling of not knowing and wanting to know, to catch the way it was related to what came before, it all flowed along as the shapes and colors appeared.

What I also noticed was that it reminded me of a few very early paintings from my first year in college. At that time, I did not want to paint the way I painted. In my mind it (I) was unsophisticated. I wanted to paint the way everyone else painted. I wanted to do it like they did. This belief was my conditioned destiny. It caused the tension I lived with for years.

If I had known that doing it like they did, which was basically aimed at belonging - and wanting to be myself - were two opposite wishes, I could have asked for support to find the way to paint my paintings.

It’s ok.
I learned other good things and am still finding my way to own my way.
Which after 40 some years of painting (and 62 years of living) is a good thing to be able to say.
I have not given up.
I wouldn’t stop process painting for the moon.

In process I am able to see so directly what I do to protect myself from the tenderness of being myself (as well as not knowing myself) 
and how I shy away from experiencing the tenderness of creativity itself.
What I saw myself do after I began the small painting today was to overlook this tenderness.

While I was mixing paint for tomorrow, I tested the blue. Boldly I painted radiating stripes from behind my head.
The beginning had not even had a night to rest before she was over shadowed by this willful move of mine. And I put a strand of pearls on her neck!

Where was I? Had I moved out of relationship so quickly from the previous hour that I moved in to use her for my own agenda, to test a color, to make a bold radiant background?
Could I have held in awareness the possibility, instead of filling up that empty waiting space?
If I had held to the self identity (am I looking for a rule here or a good direction….) If I had held the identity of myself with a bit more care, would I have moved so boldly?
My answer is that I was not in relationship to the painting.
Whether the image begins as myself or not, the main thing is to be in relationship to the painting.
It is, after all is said and done, only me, realistically and spiritually speaking.


I am breathing and writing through this and asking myself for some compassion.
I saw what I did. It was a conditioned response. And thank goodness no harm was done! I’ve been known to be more foolish in real life. But my stomach did feel the difference when I saw the first photo at the end of the day.

Until I made that comparison I was unaware of how my will had moved into the process and moved me out of relationship.
Then I judged me.

I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
I love you.
Thank you.

How many times will I be called to forgive myself?
100,000 times or more.
To see again how hard a judge is and always is.
To see that some judgements flow by, and I breathe easy and others find their hook and settle in, inviting me to breathe deeper into not knowing.

A beginning is something new.
I learned quickly through this painting, how I want to bring more attention and care to a beginning. 
To let it unfold slowly. 
To stay in relationship to the empty spaces, too.

There is nothing to gain in barging into a beginning with such bravado.
And the process let me see that, and to even question that statement!

Tomorrow I will step in to what is there, and come back into relationship to the potential that is waiting to unfold.
The process also lets me step out of the control I wish I had on the painting, on myself, and yes, on life.
Oh, there is the idea still alive and well that mistakes are mistakes and not opportunities for learning.

Again and again, the love I have to paint has found a way to be of service to self knowledge and to my own gentle and colorful surrender.

her sense of humor

"In the absence of role models for the new feminine in our culture, the Goddess speaks through dreams and creative imagination, giving guidance to those who choose to listen. Her sense of humor always softens the sharpness of her approach. Her compassion for the human being in the human situation establishes a strong, loving container so long as communication is kept open." ~ Marion Woodman


I was on the receiving end of her humor tonight as this painting came to a completion. I was hovering near an end that I did not know but knew I had to dare toward.
And so, the erection came in from the left side and the brown man appeared, with his hand outstretch to the woman.
Then I waited.
And the apple dropped into his hand.

The humor did not escape me of him handing her the apple.
Red splashed into the remaining white spaces and the painting and I felt complete.