Healing and growth through intuitive art
The parts of the head
And shoulders
Spread to all the wrong places
As if they were kids
In a school intermission
Instead of being controlled
By the rules
They freely followed
Their hearts
As a result
Harmony settled in
In which
Effortlessly
All individual whims together
Became the complete expression
Of the one.
In the moment I finish it I know I want to use some colored pencil on it. I know where and how. I wait for the drawing to dry. I listen to the radio. The music is beautiful. Then I look again and the drawing is dry. And it is beautiful as it is. It is poor in terms of colors. Only one. All that it does was accomplished with the yellow color alone.
But it has endless variations in the way the lines are made. Thin and fat, close to each other and far, straight and round. Sometimes they touch each other and become one line. The expressions of the lines are different. Each little part is different from all the others. The spaces in the drawing are very different too: Closed and open, narrow and wide, pouring into the next space or keeping to themselves.
The whole thing starts from a line that is like some ground. One side of the drawn shape goes up. The other starts going up and then turns around and goes down. The right side is listening to the left side, and when the left one makes a left turn, the right one also starts to turn left. Maybe the right side is more burdened and this is why it cannot go as high as the left one?
Are they one thing with varying sides? And what is that little something at the very right edge? Maybe the right side part stopped going up because it wanted to look at that little thing? So this side is independent, making its own decisions, even though it is obviously connected to the left side. The left one must be independent too. It is just like us, having the ability to make independent choices and at the same time being an inseparable part of the all.
That little shape at the right edge, is it coming or going?
Why did the left part turn back down?
Are they playing?
They have the spirit of playing, don’t they?
Do you need any more than one color?
Is the yellow gold, warm light or straw?
Where does the whole thing stand?
If you happen to walk near it, what will your relative size be?
And if we are left with questions only, is this a good thing or not?
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.
And today it happened. Today I understood how you can love everything in your earth life, including the suffering. Because you see the beauty of the game that you, the bigger you, has and is still creating.
You are lead into a blind alley that you create and the keys are handed to you. And don’t worry. This is not a contest. The doors will keep appearing. The smells will cross the barriers of the ends of reality. The sun will rise in you, unstoppable. So don’t worry. Take it all in, as this is what you are here for: To take it in and to crack the walls at the same time. And you cannot even say that this reality does not exist.
What becomes clear is the reality of your experiencing and the opening of your expression of the truth.
Maybe this is a nice place to end this part of the blog, and to start a new part. Let’s see where it will go…
intuitiveflow 