Healing and growth through intuitive art
I wouldn’t mind
having a big room where
on the clean floor
somewhere farther than the middle
this
will stand
just a line
maybe dark grey
as here
and people will get
a little book
of white thick paper
and a beautiful small collection
of very soft oil crayons
to do anything they want
with color
and I will go away
to sit in the garden
with a cup of
coffee
and infinity
then
people will come to me
with their color works
and we will laugh
like children
on a free day
from school.
I thought about this many times lately. It was like an old friend, knocking on my window to wake me up.
Drawing is my most direct expression. When I started doing abstract drawings many years ago, I was thinking about sculptures that I wanted to make. I did not have the how to, the where to, and I was busy doing other things that I thought were what I wanted to do.
But the ideas were insistent and felt as if they were calling me. So I drew them. Almost all my abstract drawings for years were sketches for sculptures. In my imagination I was making sculptures all the time.
Then the drawings started to have a life of their own. They were independent of everything else, and I did them as final artworks.
A friend from Germany created an opportunity for me, to have an exhibition in Koln. I sent pictures of my works and the deal was made. I leafed through my many drawings and those I chose, I decided to sew onto canvases. I had an old sewing machine but I did not know how to use it. I remembered seeing my grandma sitting at an old Zinger and I imitated all that I remembered her doing, and the machine started to sew.
I started to draw with the sewing and at the same time that it connected the drawings to the canvases, it became part of the drawings. I let the ends of the threads hang from under the canvases. Then some of the instruments I had on my table as I was working found their way onto the canvases too, with some glue, as they seemed to be just what was needed there. Then came words. Some paintings had a word or two. Others had poems.
For a month and a half the works hang in the gallery. I had a good review in the local newspaper. The curator of one of the museums visited my show. I made friends with other artists and I went to visit their shows.
All the works were not just rectangular with straight edges. They had irregular shapes and stuff extended from their edges into the space around them. This is the point here. Irregular shapes, and breaking away from being restricted into rectangles.
Then I participated in a collage class and all the works that I did there refused to be blocked in a straight lined frame. They all had things sticking out of them.
In this drawing I thought about a sculpture again and I let the shapes play in a big shapeless background. I cropped it for the blog, but the frame here does not have as an important part as the cropping has in all the other paintings in this blog.
In this painting there is not even one little part that is not totally alive with the experience of now.
Is it a plate with something on it?
Is it a ship, traveling on a golden sea?
Is it a jungle with a cloud?
Is it about having been in a place where food was ready for me on the plate, and a ship has come to take me out of the jungle onto the open, golden sea?
Now, what will happen next? “What will happen next” is a pregnant question and all is good.
The pink
Is riding the ochre
The pink is a saint
We know this by the halo
He’s also a juggler
And even if his clubs
Fall
They never reach the ground
Just like him
The drawing lines
Try to be
A judge
A piano
A horse
A boat in Venice
To make the people laugh
Going forward
He looks at us
The watchers in the air
Who know
That nothing is happening
At all
And this is why
We laugh
Like children.
As soon as I finished it and I wanted to go to bed, I felt that there was something good in it.
I saw it in passing two more times that night and the feeling was still there.
In the morning it became clear to me that I really like this one very much.
This one does not go anywhere. Yes, you can feel that it is part of a bigger scene, and there are more things beyond the borders of the paper, but there is no feeling of wanting to go out, or of any other struggle. There is only the interest in what is happening here now.
The lines and the areas of color join together in a local play. The main interest for me is in how the different color areas touch each other and blend to a degree, but stay independent too. Like the different tastes in a dish that feel good together and at the same time you can tell exactly what are all the ingredients that were mixed in it.
It’s a delicate pleasure and my heart sings. Even though a whole day has passed, it still sings, and that’s the power of real satisfaction.
The most satisfying feeling that one can have as a human being is to experience the truth of who he is. Maybe it is a strange thing to read now, and I can write about it some time later, to make the idea open to everyone. In my life experience I found this to be true.
When we feel unsatisfied, we try to make the experiences that moved us stronger, longer, more pronounced in some way. But this does not really bring more satisfaction. It brings more wanting and frustration.
To find what is deeply and truly satisfying, find a way to get calm and develop an interest in your own inner responses to what is happening now. In those energy movements that you can detect in your being as responses to what is happening to you now, and in your curiosity about them, you will find the main road to knowing yourself and to the beauty, art and truth that you are.
Under the drawing lines there are only two shapes. One is yellow. One is multi colored. The drawing lines above the second, bigger shape, were used as borders among the colors. The drawing and the multi colored shape became glued to each other through this. They became one.
But from the top of the multi color shape, the drawing continued to go out into the world and play.
-Come back, drawing. Time for dinner.
-But it is so much better to play out here. Do you hear, Mama? The yellow shape shouts “Catch me!” But no, I’m not going to hold on to anything. -Shine on, yellow. Be free like me. Don’t worry Mama. We are going to have a good time, all of us. Look: I’ve already made some fruit!
-Oy vey, my child is leaving…
(This was my subconscious.)
I am.
I think of A.
I make A out of myself.
In order for A to be A, it needs B all around it.
So B is created too just as I create A.
Now A, a part of me who is different from everything else, and B, also a part of me who is different, interact with each other. The interaction is an experience. I feel how the energy of the experience moves inside of me. I can feel it because it is different from the calm me.
Now, if I give A the ability to change at will, the result will be that different B’s will be created around the different A’s. And every pair of A and B will create a different experience in me.
When you are the only being in existence, you need to be innovative, if you want to somehow know that you are, or to know your potential.
Without creating you don’t know yourself.
Creating is the way to self-knowledge (and self-love).
If you ever have the question “Who am I?” Create, and you will know at least one way that you can be.
You will know much more. You will know yourself in a deeper way.
You will know satisfaction. You will know flexibility, you will know that magic is how things are always done, and you will know that there is no final knowledge. You will also know that there is no truth. There is only the now experience.
Yesterday and today I did two new paintings. I did them small. You finish faster this way and are able to see what you made immediately.
I look at the second one now, the one I just finished.
The first one is also interesting to share and maybe it will be in the next entry.
I wonder again about the function of the second layer, the layer of the colors.
The way it looks in this painting is that the line-work is the story, rich in details, like reality itself. It also means that it has in it all the stories that I have used to create this reality. That’s just another way to say it.
And the colors layer with the simplified shapes is a second way to tell that same story. Only it is devoid of the dramas of the first layer and loaded with (my) sense of beauty, which is a characteristic of the language of the real.
These two layers/languages work together through me to create my experience of everything. I experience all the busy details with all the contrasts, difficulties, hesitations, scares and daringness. And I also experience the deeper play of the energies that reveal more beautiful mixtures as steps occur. Again, when I write ‘beautiful,’ I mean my experience of beauty. In the deeper layer there is a sense of peace that is not in the story level.
The lines can be irritating, worrisome, too fast to attend to in a full way, but the existence of the deeper view at the same time and in the same place gives the calm feeling of: everything is okay. We are moving from one beautiful thing to another. Things work together. It is a good world, hiding right under the busy illusion.
You choose to go out (into reality) and you become more worried and more irritated. You choose to step in and you heal. You find the freedom and the satisfaction of meeting with your true self.
What is your true self?
It is a moving target. It is always in the deepest place that you can access now. Tomorrow it may be even deeper.
