The Wisdom of Not Knowing Everything

 I am blessed and blissed by this image.  “Tidal Wisdom” could also be titled “Handcestors.” I love the misspelling of the word ancestors which popped out of my fingers on the keyboard early on in the painting process.

Some of the parts which surprised me as they came into form:

her right knee becoming a cliff which plunges into water and shelters the moon,

those moonlit, glowing feathers on the eagle,

her strong left leg and foot planted so firmly on the boundary between above/below,

the look of tenderness and equanimity on her face,

her hair, which became a headdress of cosmic connection, showed up because I didn’t know how to use acrylic paints. Luckily, I stepped back and saw that what was happening on the paper was quite magical and so kept doing it even though it wasn’t what I intended at first.

Speaking of stepping back: painting BIG, painting DEEP, requires frequent stepping back to see the whole. Doesn’t that also sound like a prescription for living life more sanely? Always remembering to take a moment and step back…

Every time I step back to see who she is, what my brush strokes have brought forth, I’m astonished.

Every time I step back to see who she is, I’m swept by love.

Every time I step back to see, I’m startled by knowing what she needs, what “they” want to deepen their resonance.

Every time I step back, I’m humbled by painting, by bringing something forth from nothing, by trusting and sticking with the process and trusting some more.

Every time I step back, I’m surprised yet again by life.

I could never have imagined that this, which began with poster paint:

would become this painted in acrylic: And yet that’s what happened, that’s what grew, that’s what appeared. So much like the process of birth and gestation isn’t it, never knowing ahead of time what our combination of genetics and environment will bring forth. . . the great mystery of moments entangling with each other and unraveling as something new and unexpected…like finding a gem in the middle of the knot in the red thread!

By the by, this image is available as a print in two sizes, 12 x 16 and 10 x 12. Contact me if you’re interested at: deborahmltn@gmail.com.

To my surprise, when I view the video to launch week four of this six weeks class, I learn we are encouraged to take a break from painting. WHAT??? I can’t wait to get my brushes into the paint. Being the rebellious elder that I am, I decide to follow my bliss.

I had to jump into action by cutting my image into bits and pieces.

I hope you’re startled by that announcement. That idea sure startled me! But I knew it was right.

Here’s how that idea came to me.

I walk everyday with my dogs in the wood across from where I live. It’s a magical place…a place of communion where I rarely see another human but often see/hear birds of all kinds. This past two weeks I’ve been graced by eagles – both bald and golden ( or maybe immature bald, I don’t yet know how to distinguish but for size. This one is BIG so I think it’s a golden. ) as well as crows, ravens, hawks, ducks, geese, and woodpeckers of various sorts including piliated.

As I walk this morning before beginning to paint, I am stewing a bit over the fact that my paper, BIG though it is, is already covered with images and I can’t imagine how to make something more of it. I reach the pond and shock of shocks, a huge golden eagle, hidden behind a partially sunken log takes off from the water and showers me with droplets.

I swear that bird dropped an epiphany into my brain. Cut up the painting, you twit, cut it up and collage it all back together, consolidating all the angsty stuff at the bottom to serve as compost for life, which is after all the truth. On fire, I – and the dogs – scamper back home. I take down the brown paper, cut out every last hand and face, tape together four new stronger pieces of paper, and gesso it with gray.

In several of my paintings in recent years, I have been compelled to draw a thin red line across the bottom. This happens now. Linked to the mythic red thread, for me it marks the permeable membrane between one reality and another. So I paint that red line and start applying the hands where the juicy action begins – beneath that line, out of sight, in the dark and unknown.

Here’s the silenced woman before I cut her in two.

Here’s how she looks with all the old imagery pasted onto the new paper. I know the silenced/compassionate woman’s face has to be partly under and partly above the red line because I know she won’t be silent much longer!

Look at all the room I have now, for something more to appear. I’m ecstatic.

Midstream in this process, I suddenly remember Jes Gordon, another student in this session of DEEP, and realize that my subconscious took her video and collage method as my own. I laugh out loud. Thank you Jes.

At some point after applying most of the hands underneath and the egg shape with salmon mostly above that red line, I step back to take a photo and suddenly “SEE” a goddess figure.

I develop her a little bit and live with her in this state for the next few days until I can’t resist painting again. This figure, this storyline works me 24/7. Hope you’re catching my fever!

My painting hangs on my bedroom wall where I can see it while lying in bed. The image haunts me – in a good way. It keeps showing me faces and forms, often when I’m not wearing my glasses! When I put my glasses back on, it’s often hard for me to see what I’d seen moments before. Thus, the image feels fluid, alive, mysterious, and I learn once again how valuable soft focus can be.

The salmon I saw last week has been consistently swimming in a swirling pool through all these intervening days, so I know I want to begin with revealing the fish. Which I do.  A lovely, intimate experience in which I get totally involved with putting marks on paper, caring nothing for the larger image or what is leading what/where. It doesn’t matter. I am simply making marks and loving the process.

Comes a moment though when I have to step back, take a photo, assess what next and then I see, for certain, a bear face hidden over to the left behind hands. I bring the “bearish” face into being and then realize, there’s a huge black eye right near the bear. I have to do something with that and look who shows up. Whatever it is, I love it.

I go back to working on the salmon’s pool and realize there is an arm extending from the hand to the right and a hand/arm that need clarification on the left. As I am bringing those into being, my foot flips one of my big paint brushes into my palette, covering it with blue, green and black, all along the handle and the bristles. I take that as a sign – doodle on the paper to clean the brush and use up that precious paint. So I do.

I step back and survey the whole. MMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, I feel a humanoid calling and notice two blue dots up to the far right. They’re widely spaced and I think maybe an ET figure is meant to be there, but when I begin dealing with the head shape, it turns into a woman. And as I paint her, I have to cover up a black hand but I know the hand will be painted again on top of her mouth. She is the compassionate, silenced woman – a planetary call if ever there was one.

The photo below is my ending point for week 3. I love this experience of evolving, of fertilizing and growing. Feels REAL. And I love the not knowing where this image will take me next.

I am enthralled with the unexpected thrill of painting from my heart and belly rather than my head.

A week later I return to the happy muddy muddle I began last week and find it unexpectedly difficult to resume. I use phone calls, a dog walk, vacuuming and a few other distractions to procrastinate just a bit longer but finally I light a candle and smudge, get a snack and sit down on the floor in front of the painting while I munch and feel myself back into the colors and forms. I feel the call of finger painting  again and know the beginning point is to add more dark. As I began last week, I pour out purple, blue and black tempera paint and go to work, first with a big brush and then my hands. I keep alternating between brush and hands. Suddenly red needs to be there, then the light colors again.

Finger painting becomes hand painting. Suddenly I feel my “handcestors” coursing through me and anger surges up for all the generations of alienation from my primal and indigenous origins. I begin slapping my hands on the wall and at one point I press my two hands really hard into the wall with all my might, loving how the wall resists and actively seems to push back at me. Tears pour. I’m in the grip of huge anguish and yet there is room for rational thought and the thought is this:  I wish someone were photographing this! I know my posture totally illustrates the pain, agony and anger of being separated from my primal ground since being born into this modern/urban/suburban/civilized/cultured and sterilized life.

According to neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, emotion races through our body so fast that anger, for instance, only lasts 90 seconds max… neurologically that is.  When we feel anger for days, years, hours, it is our thoughts doing that to us, not the emotion itself. So as quickly as my anger surfaces, it flies away.

Then I want to pound my hands on the cave wall of my bedroom  and yell, “I am here, I am here, I am here.”

Those words race toward the thought:  I want to make my mark on this world before I leave it.

Now I know I have made a difference in many peoples’ lives, I know that, but there is so much more I can/could do if I had more clarity, grit, daring…I feel this DEEP painting pulling me into my next era of service to the world and I am filled with gratitude.

AND then the bottom of the painting calls and suddenly I have to delineate the whisper of arcs laid down from the first session. Voila, concentric half circles begin appearing. When I step back, I can see a salmon rising from the pool of wisdom. I wonder, now, will it still look like that to me by the time I paint again. Only the painting and my connection to the painting process will reveal the next step on this journey and I LOVE THE NOT KNOWING WHAT WILL COME NEXT.

Thanks to Facebook, I stumbled upon a video that has caught my attention. Titled: “This is Water.” The storyline is deceptively simple but the message pushes and pulls at me for days. Based on a 2005 commencement address by David Foster Wallace, a man whose voice I’d never heard before, I’ve now discovered that he was a prolific author, a brilliant mind and a tortured soul. Note that past tense passive verb WAS. He committed suicide at the tender age of 46.

“This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life”, a slim book whose title is almost as long as the text, can be read in twenty minutes or so, but the import lingers…and moves me to tell you about its message: Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside of me…’Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think…to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience…The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide..what to worship. (Bold is his.)

He goes on to describe many of the things we worship as a culture today:

money,
the power of being on top,
beauty that never ages,
fame,
“the freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” (p.117)

Wallace points out how each of these is fueled by fear, contempt, conflict and craving, eventually leading each of us to feel inadequate, incapable, less than, ETCETERA.

Living unconsciously, living on our default settings, we forget to actually live.

WOW.

Take a breath, think about what you’ve just read. Really, I mean it.

And then imagine your own life lived more fully.

Take another breath.

And then – if you choose – read about my painting process for the second round of DEEP which I was privileged to experience between February and April. I find connections between Wallace’s message and my own lived experience.

For this session of DEEP I decide to go simply and playfully. I find my rolled up brown “packaging” paper, tape two big pieces up on the wall and then try to imagine how this flimsy surface is going to support one painting that takes six weeks to finish. I may have to shift to canvas midstream but I decide to trust the process and give myself permission along the way to do whatever is required to keep  one painting evolving.

Serendipity arrives in the form of a CD called Sura by Chloe Goodchild, a teacher of mine. She has the organization in the UK called the Naked Voice. I was doing grunt work of some sort while listening and suddenly realized I was singing along to a song of hers that I know in my bones but whose words suddenly had new relevance.  I paraphrase the lyrics here. A song called: Silent Laughter. The silent laughter flows like a breeze through an open window, saying BE DEEPER STILL, be deeper still, stand at zero, stand at zero.

So this painting  stands at zero for me. I begin with dots and suddenly know I have to finger paint. The energy of our painting ancestors 30,000 years ago chronicled in the film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, that energy  courses through me. Without thinking about it my left hand keeps going into the three dark colors I’ve laid out, black, blue, purple, and my right hand goes into the white, cream, peach…I don’t know why the dark and the light so frequently intertwine in my imagery but here it is again. Then I have to add a bit of color in between – red and green.

I love this muddy muddle – I don’t know why. What I do know is that I have been in the grip of true expression and that is the water I swim in!

Today I’m sharing a painting process that occurred six months ago. It’s finished, a lot of water has flown under the bridge since then and yet, I remember the satisfaction of painting this one as if it were today.

It may be the most potent painting of my life and I’m not sure why I say that. Something about possibilities and freedom.  I am aware that this image is possible because of my skills and development as an artist for the last twenty years and I am aware that I may never have so completely abandoned myself to a painting’s lead. For instance those red ribbons need to remain. I even make them more brilliant and defined.  When the painting is done, I still don’t know why they seem so important. I see them giving boundaries to the mystery and maybe that’s IT. All I need to know. Life is Mystery after all.

My desire to reveal humanity’s commonality often moves me to paint an “unreal” skin color, or in this case to make each limb illustrative of a different two-legged race. You can see the difference in the hands for instance.

 And I love the portal into the landscape of my indigenous soul. Even the white horse of Uffington finds its way there. I can imagine the old Roman road linking my modern biological self to my ancestors as it spills out, through, and down between my legs as another red, zigzagging ribbon. WOW…birth’s blood.

The painting got harder as I got close to finishing. I didn’t want to mess it up. I am surprised by the androgyny. I keep being surprised by all of it. I keep being startled by how much I love this image, even now. For reasons beyond my understanding, I feel as if I have arrived as a painter, that nothing will ever be the same, that I have found and expressed a deep, daring and truthful part of myself that will never be hidden again. And that is JUST THIS, just the way it is.

Originally, I think I’ll be painting a goddess woman with a skirt but I’ve painted strong legs. They demand being seen.

I think the mid section might be a mandala but as I lounge on my bed for a break I gaze at the painting ( my art studio is also my bedroom ) and suddenly see a box with an open lid where the vagina would be. I imagine a trap door releasing butterflies, angels or something.

I get off my bed and toddle over to the picture and begin painting more on the legs. I am not sure if they will remain loose or get detailed. I’m surprised by how stiff acrylic is – difficult to use after tempera but I love it – the freedom of adding layers, which totally obscure what’s beneath, delights me. And that delight arrives after years and years of adoring watercolor for precisely the opposite reason…I love its transparency and rarely use them opaquely.

I begin the head today – ask myself how my own head is feeling as our teacher, Connie,  had instructed.  I’m reaching for heaven but not sure I can stretch that far! I know I need both brain hemispheres to be alive, active, whole and well. I know the right hemisphere is a garden and the left is the cosmos. Geometric, sacred shapes I use a lot – cross, circle, triangle, spiral and square appear. Both hemispheres are fertile, changing, metamorphosing. They meet in the center. The face is looking off to the right. I don’t know why.

The next day, I begin by painting  but oh my god, I am filled with too much anxiety over needing to prepare for the art tour and to move and with worry about my car which collided with a deer last week. My belly is disquieted/rumbling/uneasy. I know it’s nerves. I am not sick.  I quit painting in order to pack and return to the image in the evening. The painting process takes me. I see a fist for the right hand and paint it in but know it probably won’t stay. The angle of the head has been telling me I need to have a hand that is holding something: a ball? a crystal gazing globe? Now I think it may be the moon because the face seems to glow with moonlight, not sun.

Instead of a box where the vagina would be, I suddenly know I have to paint the archway that mesmerized me in an English folly – the vagina becomes a portal. A path from my ancestral landscape has to fall out of that portal and lead down to the planet where my feet currently stand. As I write this sitting in front of the image, I see how the mystery of the universe can be embedded between the red stripes above the portal. Those red ribbons are so potent for me and I don’t know why but I know I must honor them and keep them in the painting.  Those red ribbons contain the mystery.

And I’m struck as I write this for you now how painting this way engages my entire being. There is no right, no wrong, no technique, no mistake nor striving to reach a goal, just painting in response to what the painting shows me, wants from me, ignites in me. I don’t question, I just engage. And isn’t that a grand analogy for living fully?