On Process and Perfection

 

Meditation in the Elysian Field, 2026, 30 X 30 inches 

Wouldn’t it be remarkable to be able to ask da Vinci or Michelangelo about their process of painting and if they pre-visualized every image or if there were significant discoveries during the making of an image? Did they feel that their best works were solely their’s or was there a higher power’s helping hand in the creating?

 If we consider the art of making to be a shared experience with matter, guidance and ourselves, it involves a degree of trust and as Rick Rubin’s suggests, some detachment. Just like life, the creative is always reacting to the circumstances of the moment. Make one corner more blue and something else will undoubtedly have to shift as well to balance that color. Sometimes just like life, we paint ourselves into a corner and perhaps it takes some effort to get out with grace.

When we reach an impasse, we may experience feelings of hopelessness. The ability to stay out of the story, zoom back, and see new pathways into and around a challenge will be of boundless use. ………our imagination frees us from the web of personal and cultural stories engulfing us. Art has the power to…open our minds to what’s possible, and reconnect with the eternal energy that moves through all things.*

I love that Rubin's uses the words, eternal energy, because it signifies to me that there is an infinite opportunity to find a solution. I often work on a painting over many years, I may show it and then change it later on if I feel I can improve upon it in someway. I am not particularily attached to working quickly; as per the painting above which has been an eleven year journey. In the lower right area of the image there was from the onset a hawk, a specific Harris's Hawk that a photographer friend had photographed in captivity. The bird had been rescued and she met it at an event. I did my best to capture its likeness from her photo --the hawk was very focused and intent. In the process I grew quite fond of the image but try as I might, it never felt completely resolved, I would put it aside but I kept at it, changing one area and then another until one day I determined to set the bird free. I painted over his striking face and shoulders. I came to understand the painting: Black bird had spoken. She came to represent the inner bird, the place one goes in deep meditation, the place of symbolized by the Eye of Horus. 

(to be continued....)

*Rick Rubins

The Creative Act, 226-227

Seeing is Believing, Sometimes

I have been working on a painting off and on again for about eleven years. I know that’s pretty ridiculous but I put a good deal of investment into the material foundation, a hand built panel to which I covered with stretched canvas because I really like the combination of canvas over  a hard surface. With this method I can work it on an easel or laid down on the floor. It can tolerate sanding and scraping without much concern about damaging the canvas. And this piece had to be a slow evolution because the metallic leaf I used on most of the surface is fragile and needs a delicate hand. 

 Sometimes we block the flow of information being offered and compromise true listening.

-Rick Rubin

This was written in regard to making music but holds true with seeing something as well. Our experience of creating anything may be subject to ego and critical thinking. It may be subject to our emotions, our lack of understanding where the piece wants to go, perhaps we are into our fears. Maybe we are in a bad frame of mind and judging harshly. We see the glass as half empty instead of almost full. (According to AI overview, we should be grateful to have a glass in the first place!)

I have felt more than one piece was worth nurturing over time and so I have put paintings away sometimes for years before reevaluating and making further changes with a fresh outlook. I am a typical moody artist and I often laugh or growl at myself in the studio when I fluctuate between loving something I am working on one minute and not liking it all the next. How can the same image appear so differently? 

Recently I was looking for a tube of oil paint in my studio and found that it was nearly dried up; I had to cut the tube with a razor blade to get to the last little bit of paint: Holbein Indian Yellow. One of my most favorite colors for it’s transparency as a glaze and for its unique color which is rather like the spice, tumeric.

Two artist supply stores in my vicinity were out of it and I learned that the color has been discontinued. Looked online but no luck, so I called a store at random on the east coast and they suggested looking on Ebay. Voila! I found a single tube and ordered it. The cost with shipping will be my groceries for a few days, but I have a smile on my face. After a long relationship with this paint, decades of romance, I couldn’t quite believe the relationship was over, now we can get back together. 

As soon as it arrives, I know just what I am going to do with it, and then treasure found, I think the painting will at long last, be done.

May and Elixir Vitae

It’s the month of May on a warm overcast day. I wanted to get to the river’s edge with my dog, Belle, before the time of the perfume of tiny yellow flowers comes to a close. All along the Rio Grande, which is less than a little trickle in most places during our long drought, thankfully we still have cottonwoods and fruit-bearing mulberry trees and they are dripping with delicious edible berries just now. But it is the Russian olive trees in bloom that I didn’t want to miss, part of the understory of the forest, which we call in Spanish, bosque (pronounced boss-k). The Russian olive's leaf-out and flower almost simultaneously and so from a distance one can only detect the soft sage green leaves. Sensing a subtle scent, I approached the first one with a hopeful expectation.

Yes, yes, there were tiny flowers, some already dry, yet a few still very much alive. As we walked deeper along the trails there were many more and I was not disappointed. The flowers are so small individually, the circumference of an eraser head with the most delicate lemon yellow petals, many thousands upon thousands on each tree. Their aroma scents the whole of the bosque and permeates the air with a delicate fragrance that I adore.

Belle splashed along the river’s muddy edge as I smiled at our shared joy. Picking the darkest  ripest mulberries off branches and taking it all in like an elixer vitae, there is nothing like springtime when everything is in renewal. 

The topic of our habits as artists is in my awareness today, specifically, how to shift from the customary manner with which we work in order to perhaps arrive at a new place. How can we break the spell of the familiar? Some tendencies are worth savoring like the scent of the forest each spring, others may just be an automatic propensity that doesn’t bring us to any fresh feeling of aliveness. And I am pretty certain that that is one of the main reasons we create, to touch into the spark of life.

Revisiting Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act, there is a long list* on habits not conducive to creativity including:

Impatience

Feeling you don’t have the energy it takes

Believing you are not good enough

Abandoning a project when it gets too difficult

Romanticizing negative behaviors or addictions

Believing a certain mood or state is necessary to do your best work (have felt this one many times)

and another one I know well, distractibility. 

And everyone’s favorite, procrastination.

May the season of renewal rekindle your best tendencies to create. May the new life emerging, the scents of flowers, budding potential be a catalyst for you.

*From The Creative Act, pg.139

The Firebird

 

A friend of mine went to the ballet last weekend in NYC and saw The Firebird (French: L’Oiseau de Feu.)  I didn’t recall the story and didn’t know that the music for this ballet was composed and orchestrated by Igor Stravinsky, so I did a little research and watched an exquisite production from 2016 online, Return of the Firebird, by Andris Liepa performed and filmed in Russia’s Mosfilm Studios. When the ballet originally premiered in June 1910 with the Ballet Russes company in Paris the production met with much acclaim and today it is still considered a masterpiece of music, dance and storyline. What struck me most upon reading about the ballet is the way Prince Ivan rises above challenges and the gifts of support that come when he connected to nature, where in the enchanted forest he meets the supernatural Firebird. 

Based on Russian folk tales, the concept was proposed by the poet and ballet lover, Pyotr Petrovich Potyonkin. Inspired by the 1844 poem, by Yakov Polonsky, A Winter’s Journey: 

And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf’s back

Riding along a forest path

To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar

In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,

Pining behind massive walls.

There gardens surround a palace all of glass;

There Firebirds sing by night

And peck at golden fruit. 

While the motif of the Phoenix, a Greek and Egyptian symbol of resurrection that burns and rises from its ashes is similar, the Firebird differs somewhat. She too rises and overcomes challenges but it is through her support of another, Prince Ivan, who spares her life upon meeting her, that the Firebird represents treasure and the magical aspects of renewal through relationship to nature and other. The idea of helping spirits always intrigues me and especially in the realms of birds. 

From a shamanic perspective, everything is alive. The feathered, the furred, the scaled  ones; the seawaters swelling with the moon’s phases; the wind passing through autumn’s yellow cottonwood leaves; snowfall in the mountains, All That Is has its own natural frequency or state of resonance with everything else. From the perspective of physics, we exist in a vast electromagnetic field, and through that expanse, so too our individual hearts are linked. Some call this the web of life. 

When Will Taegel, who wrote the book, Walking with Bears, lost his bearings in a small canyon, somewhere in northern New Mexico along a dirt road on route back to Albuquerque, he stopped and took a moment to take in his surroundings.  Off to his left in a pinyon pine, a bright blue bird appeared. It flew off to another tree, inviting him to follow along:  This elusive guidance was not from the invisible world but the very visible. Such a fusion of the invisible and the visible seemed to be a hallmark of primal wisdom. 

Astonishingly, the blue bird led me directly to a numbered highway, …I mused that I now had powers beyond common sense, reason, and even imagination in connecting with a natural order underneath the disorder of my ordinary life.

Guidance is always available when we align to it, powers great and small can be helping spirits to us all. The tale of The Firebird is that kind of magical encounter: found treasure, ally, support in Mother Nature, guiding us underneath the seeming disorder of ordinary life. 

Finding Balance Within

 

photo credit: Lisa Kessler, Boston 

On a summer morning as I was doing a few minutes of yoga on my patio, I noticed that my body was curiously moving into a kind of involuntary dance. Oddly, I felt a bit like a marionette, some subtle outside force seemed to be gently directing my strings.  My right arm lifted up perpendicular to my right side, I observed myself pointing my index finger as if it were the nose of a gun. I played along and closed my left eye as I aimed over an imaginary barrel. Another similar movement followed, I observed my left arm pull back on a make-believe bow and arrow, my torso and left shoulder turned to my left with a particular erect sense of posture as my eyes focused toward an invisible target. 

Then came the action of a quick thrusting forward, my right arm stretched as in a fencing or jousting position, my knees bent slightly outward. I felt fiercely intent within and yet light on my feet.  These momentary gestures became a bit of a game, one after another. As my body shifted again, I reoriented as if I held a knife in my right hand, in a stance of aggression and unlike anything I am familiar with in my current female oriented incarnation.

Strangely, my thinking mind was not a part of this process. Who was pulling the strings?  Perhaps some subconscious guidance connecting me to understanding my own balance, I do not know. But, as I relaxed into this odd mid-summer dream I noted another shift of movement arising from the left side of my body. I was in a duet with my own body. Softly, a gentle rocking motion began to sway my hips. I leaned a bit to the left, cradling an imaginary form within my arms, as if nursing a baby. Though I hoped none of my neighbors witnessed these spontaneous expressions rising up, this patio pantomime was genuinely instructing me of many things. Shiva and Shakti are the universal aspects of the masculine and feminine as they are expressed in Tantric cosmology. There is not Shiva without Shakti nor Shakti in the absence of Shiva. Together they embody the One.

I thought I understood this on an intellectual level but during and after this sequence of movements, I had a full body inner comprehension. We hold the mystery of life -energy within our cells; we know that when we transmit a smile, show kindness to another, actualize frustration, or express anger. We embody both the giver and the receiver when we engage our energy patterns. It doesn’t matter whether we are male, female, trans or non-binary, we all have varying degrees of these yin and yang qualities within us. These attributes are simply words to describe archytypes more than gender.

As the world turns, there is great unrest in the Middle East and it is easy to fall into fear, and to lose our balance, serenity and sense of safety when purusing the headlines. In the Holy Lands, profoundly significant to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at this time there is zero sense of calm and order. Imbalance seems to be leaning entirely toward the unhealthy dominance of one side, let's call it the yang principle. In Traditonal Chinese Medicine, too much yang typically manifests as increased heat/activity causing high fever, anxiety, and anger. Calming practices are what is needed to restore balance. 

Cove Acupuncture in East Hollywood, Los Angeles has this to offer in terms of descrbing these principles: 

A healthy body is a body in equilibrium, with equal parts yin and yang. We get out of balance when we have too much or not enough yin and yang. There are four basic patterns of imbalance in the body (there are actually many more, but at their most basic...):

Yin Deficiency: too little yin in the body. This is characterized by thinness, dryness, a slight fever, malar flush (rosy cheeks, chin, and forehead), and night sweats (among other symptoms). Extreme yin deficiency can be seen in wasting diseases, including cancer and AIDS. Yang levels are normal, so fever is low grade.

Yang Deficiency: too little yang in the body. This is characterized by heaviness/overweight, excess dampness (phlegm, edema), feeling cold, and having a pale face. Patients with yang deficiency may also have slow digestion and loose stools. Because yin levels are normal, the patient only feels slightly cold. Yang is the motive force behind all types of metabolism, so metabolism is slowed in yang deficient patients.

Yin Excess: Similar to yang deficiency, but heavier, wetter, and slower. The patient will feel more cold; edema will be worse. Yang levels are normal, so the motive force is still there, but it is handicapped because it has to move greater amounts of heavy yin.

Yang Excess: Too much heat in the body. At its extreme, this is seen in high fevers, including hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola. Less extreme yang excess can be characterized by restlessness, anxiety, and fidgeting (as well as skin rashes, burning stools, heavy sweating, and a fully red face). Yin levels are normal, but prolonged yang excess will burn away yin.

How can we restore balance within? From the outset, the one thing we have control over is our response. We do not--contrary to popular belief-- need to be reactive. We can find peaceful practices such as walking in the woods; going to a large body of water; hiking in the mountains; establishing a regular meditation, there are various forms; eating healthy nutritious food; and definitely avoiding the things that tend to scorch our serenity. May peace be with you.