It's All About the Practice

As storms dissolve our roads and bridges and chaos dissolves our sense of an orderly life, the obstacles to creativity are dissolving too. This is a theme that has surfaced in conversations with a number of friends lately. This is a good thing, right? Things that have before seemed difficult or out of reach are flowing with ease. The time between stating a clear intention and having it manifest is becoming shorter and shorter. An example from my experience is a show of works I made this summer that currently hangs in the Farmer and the Cook, an Ojai, CA cafe. I decided to follow the advice I give others and go into my studio every day and just make work. For some time I had been collecting phrases from the daily newspaper that struck me. No criteria except that visceral 'hit' that a combination of words taken out of context can sometimes deliver, a sort of found poetry or enigmatic fragment. I wrote these down on index cards without a plan. In the studio it occurred to me to paint the words onto colored backgrounds just really as an exercise, something to do. I love mixing colors and painting them over old canvases or over failed watercolors on heavy Arches paper, paper too good to throw away. In a sense it was all a recycling project. Collecting bits of text, discarding the sense or meaning, covering over old tentative marks, lining up the index cards to see which ones still gave me that 'hit.' These elements constitute art making as practice. It doesn't matter exactly what the actions are, it matters that actions are performed regulary. Like warm-up stretches for dancers or scales played by musicians, art practice is done out of faith in the process of creativity. Practice is relational, it is about showing up to play with the Creative Source. Then at some point, pleasure happens, that thrilling moment when the mark is simply exquisite and what was rote reveals beauty. Beauty causes sensation to reverberate in the body, it echoes up and down the spine, it sends a tingle in the hands, the feet, the groin, sometimes even a tear to the eye. Such a moment is sublime and it is dangerous. Most of us are unschooled in how to appreciate pleasure. Pleasure rocks the boat. The mind which had been lulled into quiet by the repetitive action of the practice is suddenly roused and feels compelled to name that sensation. Oh the mind, the dear, dear mind! It doesn't matter what name the mind assigns: "success", "fluke", "breakthrough", "accident", the pleasure of the bodily sensation has fled, replaced by a feeling of disorientation that many of us quell by reaching for substances: food, drink, drugs or distractions of phone, internet, email. I told my friend Jon today when we were discussing these weighty issues that the thing to do in those moments of grace when art happens is to stop and say thank you. The Jews, as always, have a special blessing for such things called the Shehekianu, which blesses the Divine for bringing us to this particular moment of existence, but a simple, heartfelt "Thank you" can do the trick. Then, sit and breathe, in and out until the sensation, that thrill of discovery or shiver of brilliance, is fully distributed throughout your whole being. Relax into it, breathe in deeply this tonic because that is how we evolve in complexity and beauty, how we become skilled and disciplined in our art. We are building our tolerance for pleasure.
So those word paintings I made? I made enough of them that they felt like they constituted a body of work (which for me means there were enough so some were edited out of the final group). I thought, "Gee, it might be nice to actually show them." Having practiced at receiving pleasure with grace I was able to accept the offer to show them without my mind forming endless objections ("They aren't that good", "There aren't enough pieces", "What if nobody likes them"). Breath in, breath out, make the work, show the work, see the mind, quiet the mind, feel the body, hear the body. Work, play, say thank you. Enjoy. Repeat.

Changing the World: The Suburban

Recently I visited The Suburban:
“…an independently run artist exhibition space” located at 125 N. Harvey in Oak Park, IL. run by artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killan. On their website they say: “We give complete control to the artists in regards to what they choose to produce and exhibit. Thus it's a pro artist and anti curator site. The Suburban is not driven by commercial interests. It is funded within the economy of our household. Its success is not grounded in sales, press or the conventional measures set forth by the international art apparatus, but by the individual criteria set forth by the artists and their exhibitions. In this, The Suburban is more closely aligned with the idea of studio practice than that of the site of distribution.”
The Suburban has existed in Oak Park, where I live, for ten years. I have driven, walked and biked past the modest and anonymous building that houses this endeavor countless times. There is no signage indicating an art venue. I have vaguely known that ‘some artists run a gallery in their garage’ and for years had it on my mental list to find out exactly what this meant.
Ironically, in the last two days I have also witnessed the new objects announcing the “Arts District” in Oak Park, four large metal objects that look like ice scrapers that have been erected at the Harrison Ave. and Austin Blvd. and at Harrison St. and Ridgeland. I owned and operated Studio Pardes at the corner of Harrison and Ridgeland for five years in the euphemistic arts district. One of the factors that drove me from this enterprise was the weight of expectation of being in a public space in what was essentially a retail district masquerading as something to do with art. (Disclaimer: There are some actual artists surviving on Harrison, visit Sally Wolf’s Calypso Moon for example). There was a sense of obligation to be “open” and available to a public and offering a product that was counter to the necessary solitude and self-regulation of art practice. Maybe I’m just too sensitive or easily pressured.
Both Michelle and Brad of the Suburban are art professors, Michelle at the School of the Art Institute and Brad at College of Dupage. They have consciously and deliberately created The Suburban as a site of resistance to the commercial art world while also participating in that world as gallery artists and art critics on their own terms. Milwaukee Museum of Art and the Chicago MCA have collected Michelle’s work and she is a contributing editor to X-TRA, a contemporary art journal published in Los Angeles. She is also currently completing a book about The Suburban. This is no outsider endeavor but instead a living counterpoint to global commercial art locating meaning in the site and the economy of everyday life. (See their website for an engaging reflection by the couple’s son on what it means to have an art gallery as part of the family’s economy of everyday life.)
Michelle Grabner and her husband Brad Killam have solved the dilemma that I was defeated by: they have created a commerce-free zone for art. This is an essentially political and revolutionary or maybe evolutionary act in that the Suburban also influences the other institutions of the globalized art world since artists who participate in the Suburban also participate in the world of museums, galleries and international art fairs. Work sometimes travels from the Suburban to the MCA for example or from the Suburban to the major art fairs. Art journals recognize the space and the artists who show there. By stepping outside of the circle drawn by others: art as commodity, art as investment, art as another manifestation of celebrity culture, they reduce the crushing sense of monoculture that pervades our globalized world.
I realize how powerful self-definition is. Where will the next free public art making space arise for creating culture and consciousness in community? I learned that the implicit expectation of a “storefront” had weightier implications than I realized when I signed my lease at Harrison and Ridgeland. I’ll be on the lookout for where the next opening presents itself for a meeting and mixing space where a little mess can be made and we can experiment together in making art and making life.

The Nuanced Language of Image

This time last year I was engaged in a project I called the Pomegranate Exercise. I had begun finding hollowed out pomegranates on my walks in Ojai and the image of the empty fruit spoke to my imagination. I was (and am) working on a novel about an underground group of older women. The pomegranate, its lush innards gone, skin dried dark and leathery put me in mind of the Crone. After meditating on the fruits and on all the friends who were in various sorts of life transitions, I invited women I know to engage in a meditation on the topic of age, creativity, the pomegranate itself, whatever came up. I mailed the pomegranate shells to about twenty women friends and friends of friends who responded and asked them to create art about or with fruit. The resulting art and witness writing can be viewed on my website (click on collaborative projects).
Last year the pomegranate shells were few and far between, the scarcity contributed to my sense of their preciousness. My own intention was to feel less isolated as I engaged in my fiction writing as my primary form of expression during the winter months. I also sought to experiment with collaboration, a skill I would like to learn more about. Sallie Wolf, one of the artists, agreed to host a show of the actual objects in her studio and I committed to create an exhibit on my website. All of this transpired and was very fulfilling.

This season, the pomegranates appear very differently, many remain on the trees, eaten, but not as thoroughly eviscerated as last year. I suspect weather conditions made the fruit more abundant so the birds and animals didn’t have to do such a thorough job of cleaning them out. My association this year is that the fruits look like exploded grenades. (In Hebrew, the word ‘rimon’ is both pomegranate and grenade). I am offered an opportunity to consider that destruction is aspect of creation. Death, endings, finishing something -- all these are necessary for anything new to manifest. I have some resistance to this. There is some grief scratching at my door, just outside of my consciousness and I have been staying a little too busy to answer the door. Until I greet that guest I know that something else that is waiting cannot arrive. What’s keeping me? Do I need a suicide bomber to enter my space? What would such a being look like? The storms of the winter attempt to instruct me, tear off the roof, flood the living room, burn down the storage shed. But do I?
It is something to do with just being, not doing, withstanding the winds of chaos, the explosions of things breaking down, with my eyes wide open and my heart wide open and my feet planted firmly on the earth. And this, strangely, feels like death.

All the Rules are Changing

Last year I discovered this wounded soldier in myself. I was surprised to meet him because I was writing about how the term ‘spiritual warrior’ was incorrect. I never expected to see a soldier of any kind show up in my own work. Yet there he was. My intention was to understand what is happening in the world and what is the right response, the right attitude, the right action? Are we on a sinking ship? Is it hopeless? I had just returned from a leadership training with the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I created this piece in the class I teach on the Creative Process at the School of the Art Institute.
I wrote in my witness: “The lone individual defending himself yet scarily, tentatively extending his heart out into the world? The black sequined and netted material felt to me like the Shadow, dark, mysterious with beauty encoded in the sequins but it also needed red because pain and passion are so tangled up in the Shadow and our Shadow flows out into the world and affects how we are in the world. But the beautiful dark rose also flows from the Shadow stream within us.

I revisited the image this week, a year later. Everything calls me to pay attention to light yet these dark images come up. I try a method that Galit, one of my students is using. She is taking words and giving them definitions based on her felt sense, her intuition. I write, “discover”- reaching into the dark with faith. Then “teaching”- collapsing my telescope and seeing what others have in their hands. I feel like an anthropologist of wound technology. I can tell with my eyes closed how the wound occurred and if I can conjure light I can heal it. Are we supposed to be wandering like this? Is this the work?

I added the mask and ‘red badge of courage’ to the soldier piece. All of it feels old and incorrect, not what’s called for. I wrote in my witness: “My shadow is the heroic guy against the world, even as I have taught others to follow their pleasure through the creative process and trust where they are led…why is this wounded place of red and black asserting itself so strongly? I’ve done the dark; I’m done with the dark. I know it’s time for light, to follow bliss. The piece answers me: “Don’t pretend you are ready.” But I am, I protest. “No, you still prize your dark credentials, you all do who earned them. It’s hard to give them up. The world no longer needs your dark roses, it needs light and you resist that and it is mostly unconscious be cause you say YES, but your body knows you lie.” So I say, “I make a new intention: I see the light, I be the light, I am the light, I love the light.” The piece says: “Let those who have genuine darkness that hasn’t reached its expiration date come to you and give them light. Your darkness is over; funny thing to mourn, but its so.” What does it mean to mourn the dark? I don’t exactly know yet but it has something to do with giving up all the well-earned credentials and meeting the world with an empty bowl. More on that later.

Happy Birthday to the Fool

So today is my birthday, number 55. Of all the experiences I've had this year, I am most pleased with having made the film The Fool.
Completing The Fool is an accomplishment for a number of reasons which I will now list as a birthday gift to myself to offset the weird sort of shaky feeling I've had since I woke up this morning.
1. The film represents a successful collaboration of a very close kind, working with another person to create and express my own vision without knowing exactly how it would turn out.
2. I collaborated with my husband, John. We have very different styles and even though we screamed at each other from time to time, I am completely sure the film would not have been finished without him and is better for his involvement. He is a "Point A to Point B" kind of guy and I am a "I need a shot of those white birds even though I don't know how it fits in the film yet"kind of gal.


3. Technology was involved. Although even a slightly dyslexic chimp could probably successfully make a film using a Mac with IMovie, the fact that we both(John and me, not the chimp) feel competent and comfortable using the editing program is an achievement.
4. I feel like this isn't a one-time thing, I think I could be endlessly fascinated making films with John about all sorts of things indefinitely and that sort of takes my breath away. Talk about a birthday gift!
Last but not least, the film has enabled me embrace being The Fool, which if you aren't familiar with the Fool's symbolic meaning: "The Fool represents the essence of what we are: whole, healthy and without fear...that spirit so often expressed and experienced in those states of wonder, awe, curiosity and anticipation." (from The Tarot handbook, by Angeles Arriens)
Now to push my personal envelope with technology, I am going to add a clip from the film, which premiered September 22, 2007 at the Third Annual Oak Park International Film Festival.
ENJOY!

Creative Work is Not a Luxury

Since I closed Studio Pardes about four years ago, my last foray into a public presence, I have accepted that writing is my primary work in the world and I have accepted that everything else, no matter how worthy, must arrange itself around that center for me to function well.
Today there is a mixture of cooler air beginning to infiltrate the muggy heaviness of Oak Park in August, the promise of sweaters just hinting. I have been writing every morning for three hours for about a year now, so I am able to keep some commitments, even if I can’t get myself to blog every week. That little bit of cool air started me thinking about my relationship to my creative work and the balance with other work in the world that we all try to do, whether its volunteering at a homeless shelter, picking up trash on a daily walk, or calling our congress people on a regular basis and participating in the democracy. It can sometimes seem like creative work is somehow an indulgence and work done directly in service to others or the world more ‘serious’ or important.
Lisa Longworth, a fellow artist and writer and I have been sharing our reflections on the balance of work as ‘engaged artists’ (to borrow from the engaged Buddhists). Neither of us is content to be alone in our studios and feel no connection to the world but our efforts to be ‘activist artists’ have been less than satisfying. (I’ll speak for myself, if you want to learn more about what Lisa is thinking, visit her terrific website and blog.)
Here’s my thought of the day on the subject: without a strong anchor in my own creative work, the energy that belongs there, which is really powerful stuff, the white light-straight-from-the-Source, gets stuffed into whatever the vehicle at hand is, a committee meeting at my temple, a volunteer bake sale, or even a casual lunch with a friend.
At times when I have not been plugged into the creative work I am called to in a daily, disciplined way, the energy can also ‘leak’ into life in general and causes intensity, emotional drama, and unnecessary conflicts and struggles with those around me.
The problem with creative energy is that it requires transformation in order to be shared successfully and a little goes a long way. Creative work, in whatever form we are called to it, is not a luxury but is the basis of life. It constitutes my relationship with the Source and if that relationship is not in order, we tend to seek substitutes in people, substances, and things.
This may seem like a pretty basic insight from someone with, oh, I don’t know, about thirty-five years of experience and education in art therapy, but there you go.

Homage to my Mom

Forty years ago today my mom died. I created a little altar space this morning with food, flowers and a yarzheit candle and an image of her from a piece of art I made.
Even though I have been working on the art piece, and planning the commemoration, when I awoke this morning I forgot. I just felt this sense of frenzy, like I had to 'get to work' right away! I sat down and journaled and I remembered. Forty years is a long time, much longer than the amount of time 'my mother' existed in my life. Yet for those forty years the relationship has continued to unfold through images. These images do not erase grief, sometimes they magnify it, but they hold a reality that has no other place in a culture of work and future oriented progress. The images let me participate in the incomprehensible mystery of life. Throughout the day I ate some of the beautiful tangerine and drank some of the sherry wine from the offering. The tangerine was a gift from my friend Aviva who came to paint yesterday. This little ritual is in my diningroom, not in a church or synagogue. I pass the altar as I go to put in the laundry, get up from my writing to pee, make lunch, and write a check for the guy who fixed my irrigation to water my new trees.
Above the sideboard that holds the altar is a painting called the Sabbath Bride.
It is a huge story painting about the return of the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God. I believe these acts of making space in my everyday life for grief and honoring, for love and ritual create the path She needs to return. I think She is calling us to undo the separation of sacred and profane and weave them back together, to weave ourselves back together, mystery with the rational, self with other, with nature. I am deeply grateful to my own mother for teaching me how to intertwine the body with the spirit by honoring the soul, the simple, the true, the everyday mystery.

Starbucks for the Soul on Every Corner?

I presented the Studio Process workshop, "Energy Made Visible" this past Saturday at a conference sponsored by the Department of Arts and Consciousness at JFKU in Berkeley. The room was packed with more than fifty artists, art educators and a sprinkling of art therapists. There was a wonderful collection of people at this conference from all over, including Peter London (No More Second Hand Art and Drawing Closer to Nature) as well as Jonathan and Alice Milne from the Learnbing Connexion in New Zealand (Google their place for a wonderful model of arts education). I invited Elizabeth Benson-Udom, one of the amazing folk in attendance to post her art and witness here.



a black form torn from
wholeness
a hand outstretched with my
little piece of yes
an active bit of movement
finally
legs running-
TOWARD MY JOY!
i am she she is me coming
from my darkness
i claim her
torn joy
and
T R A N S F O R M
i raise my tentative hand
higher and higher toward
ability
toward possibility
toward peace
carved from pieces of
myself
i see her, she, *it*, and
finally me
and when i want to
i tear the stitches
from my own heart
and begin
again to
think my
yes yes yes
crowned again
with yes
i begin
this knowing
of the dark parts
of my happy self
offering chalkboard
witness
to that which
i must continue
to do
be
move through
i keep showing up
with raised hand and
extended bits of
yellow yes
i bring my valentine
into being
to try
again and again
to run
to stand
to move
to see
to allow
to continue
to be

yes-with the invitation
to dialogue i see

begin again
keep showing up
try again and again
run toward
your exalted yes

it is your royalty
your legacy
your heritage
all impulses and
synapses and
histories of
herstorys
before you
sit with
you in
this classroom
YOU
have been
given you
birthright

THIS IS THE
HOME WE'VE
BEEN CALLING
YOU TO--

keep showing up
the chalkboard
miracles are on their way

and you 2
and you 2
and you 2
and you 2
and you 2
and you 2
YES!
Still!
Yes!
Always YES
YES
YES
YES
when you want to
it's okay to
try again and
again
again
YES!

and from that thing that is your
empty center of
connection--
the vessel and
chords through
which you
have been
nourished
and passed
know--
we will meet
you there--

we will always
call you home
(for dinner)

Elizabeth wants to create little soul stations on every corner. She lives in the suburbs and she sees women carrying out transformative work on their own bodies via plastic surgery and thinks there is a better way. She aspires to be your local neighborhood shaman, your artista instead of your barrista, helping you jolt your soul with the wake up drink of Creativity. She imagines a commercially viable, local, friendly meeting spot. My only caveat is this: the neighborhood soccer moms ought to mix with the guy who collects tin cans, they have a lot to teach each other. It will take a wide open heart to make a space that will hold the mix that needs holding. You can check out more of what Elizabeth is up to at www.writressworder.com.