I am a woman painter here in the world saying I am amazed. Here are some of my paintings where I compulsively attempt to experience answers, revelation and relief. This tremendous experience of being alive. Painting has given me solace and consolation. Answers and feedback I crave. My paintings have gifted me ecstatic experiences. I have to say more about them or feel as though I haven’t done it justice.
This world has a way of breaking us apart. Then we find our way to respond to the demanding nature of reality. I can’t be scared of my decisions to be free of it all and disappear into painting. The way it holds it all still.
The first time painting was an inspired decision. It was as if a part of myself wanted to talk to me. Sat me right down and said, “now hear this.” I was in my thirties. The energy had intense joy all around it. What came out was therapy I did not anticipate and a friendship you can’t buy. It was miraculous to me what had occurred, the clarity of the process.
Emotions were enlivened and transformed me with every stroke. There was no hiding from the reality of what was happening. My patterns of thoughts and beliefs of myself were present. My problem-solving skills were clear to me. Great feelings of being connected to myself and everything around me in this moment of stillness waiting to come through. The joy of the colors had me mesmerized and entranced.
My first painting was the only one I named for a number of years. I called it “Failure”. An attempt at a flower that moved to mud. The excitement started when I allowed my hand to recover the feeling of freedom and joy. Next to the mud, a stream, and then a sweet bird had appeared. I didn’t expect it to happen.
Before painting I had been constantly working at centering myself into my higher self. It was a thing for me. The potential of a life to do all it can by listening to itself closely. It’s a zippy kind of energy. I was in deep with meditation practices and other kinds of art, writing and drawing, but not painting. I didn’t expect that to happen really.
I had long developed spiritual practices and deeply engaged with knowing myself and trying to understand what in the world was going on within me and around me. Buddhism and the practice of listening for the deepest part of ourselves helped a lot. Letting go of anything I thought I knew was easy for me. I wanted to learn.
Painting is a good teacher of following instincts. An enlightening quest of knowing what is happening and a jump into the abyss of tell me more. It is a strange and wondrous experience. A part of a process of becoming aware of the incredibly intricate nature of being alive and the complexities of the artist trying to grasp the existential nature of reality.
You meet yourself painting, or at least it seems that way. Not just meditation on a cushion but a canvas in front of you trying to explain it all. It seemed like I had discovered rites of passage. You cross a bridge when you create.
There is a leap into other states of being and a sense of eternal time that holds it all together. You feel like yourself and everyone that has ever been. What I have done for myself was a valiant effort and attempt to sift through the mystical ways of how things speak without noise.
It was an effort to come in contact with the unconscious that seemed to guide the way. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to connect with truth. It was secretive and telling. Mischievous and full of glory.
That’s where I wanted to go. To the adult world of knowing and doing. Places where humans go in depth and understanding and return with knowledge to transform and liberate the conflicts and battles that induce terrorizing fears of reality.
A number of my paintings have correlations to Carl Jung’s work. That was a surprise that still awes me. The years of the discovery felt like I was finding the Holy Grail. That discovery encouraged me in great ways to not think of myself as crazy but instead having a very real, personal and constantly flowing conversation with something universally experienced.
I would paint something and soon after come across identical symbolism. There was a book I came across, Jung on Yoga by Dario Nardi, PhD. It had images explaining the chakras which my paintings deeply replicated. I was feeling as though I was communing with the same mystery that taught Carl Jung, that teaches everyone. We have systems of organization that go beyond the physical.
There is a painting of a pyramid torn open, with an eye looking out of it. There are two monks sitting on the edge of the open eye looking in. A Christian monk standing and a Buddhist monk sitting, both very humbled in their understanding of what they are looking into. The eye felt like it held everything that ever existed. They were silent and in shock of knowing the truth and simply present and observing not knowing what else to do.
That eye felt awfully terrifying. The Buddhist monk was holding me by a string tied around my waste. I saw a brush stroke as a figure swinging from that cord, passed out cold. I could barely paint it.
There are paintings connected to happenings going on in real time I knew nothing about consciously and learning of it in the next days news. That helped me understand the ability of us to know things no matter where we are or what we are doing. The information is flowing all the time and we pick up on it.
The paintings have strokes of colors and symbols that pertain to politics, generational changes, shamanism, blue gods, Catholic saints, Buddhism, psychology, ancestry, and archeology of the soul if I had to keep naming it. Great teachings behind human development and movements. That’s what I came to understand. We are in relationships with power we can barely comprehend with missions and purpose beyond our capacity to fully realize most of the time, but that realization contains all the world and the future as it comes in every moment.
The tree of life had come up, my own family trees and that of others, death, angels, spiritual weapons and also the level from masonic ideals. To level and plumb your life. There are guides and shamans. Robed figures bound together in other realms watching over us. There are great & wise birds flying through worlds and animals that teach of depth in experience. There are suns and moons, the sky, ocean and ground. Open windows, stairways, green fields and hidden treasures. Large pearls revealed and given as gifts. Medicine bowls and Buddha. Christ and Mary. Innocence and the shadow. How the life force energy courses through a body. The Atman and a diamond symbol of the soul.
It relieves me to put it on a canvas. It is a dance I have had difficulty replacing. It relieves me of feeling overtaken by important things asking to be known. Learning how to respond is the challenge. The understanding and knowledge of such big things that play out in this human dilemma of existing. What to do, who to know, and how to be.
The ways in which humanity has formed itself and continues to. The connections and the power dynamics within them. We have tremendous abilities still completely misunderstood. Within groups of people is found the very essence of what makes our world what it is today and tomorrow.
Obsession with the past cause habits to change slowly. Without forward movement things move along like a caterpillar. It is in the transformation to a butterfly that humanity truly takes on the characteristics of an enlightened society. The very thing that it moves towards and works for.
Generations go by, lifetimes go by, eternity exists and it’s a path all take. Painting is simply a coping mechanism for me mostly, a way that feels I am saying the things that need to be said. It is joyful and terrifying to feel it all through and learn what it is we are all about. What has come out has taught me about people, our inspirations, and our work here together.
We are alive and here with everyone else. We are of a poetic nature. We come and go and in it is beauty and terror.