ReWilding Curiosity on Canvas

Not a word of exaggeration, I am totally in love with what happens in the studio. That first slicing of the plastic and squawking of the tape as I mask off an area in the studio for our day long foray into a specific kind of wildness? Oh, now I love that series of rituals as they conjure a beginning of playfulness any adult would crave. A subtle smile begins to curve on my mouth as I trace my fingertips over the roll of canvas, its toothy and tentatively yielding integrity peels away under the robust blades of my best scissors. The crisp lines of its edges are then stretched into a new threshold of straightness as the linen is pulled over the stretcher frame and stapled with a confident “bam.” It's otherwise a quiet room this time with the house cat watching this minor transformation take place from a safe distance. The staple gun powerfully punctuated the room that always starts off clean- and for the time being- remains open and unassuming of the fun we will get into.

I enjoy my moments to myself before she arrives to surf the entrails of judgments and agendas fluttering in my mind before the stereo is turned on and shapes the tone into a deeper more internal time signature in the space. It's easy for me to let go from that judging aspect of mind and into the noticer or watcher state. The studio is where I drop into possibility and listening and have fortunately been doing so since elementary school; again through formative years in high school and later in multiple small yet charming apartments. I love my own journey to rapture but I have to say I equally enjoy the journey of gently facilitating others' experience toward a palpable freer version of themselves. In the studio, I am that front woman I wanted to be on the stage. I feel the fire of momentum circulate through me when a few elements click together and synergy is how my very eyes, hands, paint and feet merge into one instrument. I can feel where the image wants to go. I am in my most powerful place of not knowing and yet trusting. When I can get others to feel that, there is nothing better.

At around lunchtime, the sun soaks in through the skylights, offering full spectrum light to everything in its path. She is on her way, and I take the last few minutes to set up our painting area. The large table gets the full treatment where I lay our canvases flat next to water pails, palettes, an assortment of brushes for bold painting, cloths, spray bottles and a tea latte. The expensive easel however, sits like an occasional chair, looking pretty in the sunbeam but sadly, all too often, remains ignored.

Today, I am painting with one of my best friends for the second time. She came back. The first time is always the hardest for first time painters. Some don't make it back. For whatever reason, it took us over 10 years to share these paint sessions together. As she settles in, familiarizing herself again with the tools, making her area work for her body, her vibe that day and her intentions, I finesse some final details for us. I am so proud of her. She dove in head first, making critical decisions that form her inevitable expression, being the most visible expression of our unique essence. She had to decide things like “will I work big on one canvas, or try a few ideas on many smaller canvases?” It’s a game of risk, and often little reward in the beginning, yet each decision calibrates you closer to your own sense of trust, vision, and current creative capacity.

It's interesting, with practice, you find yourself happening upon insights that become wisdom. The gentler you are on yourself, the deeper the calibration to your inner guidance, the more capacity for expressing what you truly feel, versus what you think you ought to feel or -even more enslaving- what might be socially acceptable to portray. Ease creates ease. Pressure is only one way to eek out expression but it works beautifully with the art of creating ease. I enjoy the opportunity to share the power of momentum and its role in cultivating synergy. The essential catalysts for keeping that momentum focused in favor of creativity vs control is really the skillful part of teaching. Bootcamp mindset is not needed here, extrinsic pressure simply engages the survival brain and inside that mindset there is little to no creative capacity other than short term survival adaptations. Over long periods of time, and this is most people’s experience in the workplace, burnout is inevitable if we rely too heavily on emergency mindset. .

She trusted me when I shared that the only “work”in this kind of art (most art forms actually) is in the coordination exercises tethering the mind, body, eyes and inner voice. Those coordination warmup exercises are what I secretly call freedom exercises. They are seemingly childlike, producing nothing you could sell, (mostly,) but it's where you begin to experience the kind of alchemy that creatives live for.

There's a lasting kind of joy in growing a habit of trusting yourself and the creative process more than you listen to the inner critic. Finding the balance of how much control, to how much surrender determines how much you will be able to hear, feel and see the materials showing you what they want from you and really dancing from a place of “flow” consciousness.

She took on the exercises despite only seeing a few layers of her exploration drying on the canvas from last session. There wasn't a lot of proof of what was possible. Yet. Normally, that kind of bare, unfinished start can strangle a mind with the suffocating discomfort of a creative purgatory; not knowing what the end result might be. That risk of failure is always around lurking behind the scenes no matter how practiced one is.

It takes such courage to stay in wonder, the fear of it all turning to mud is real. The loss is real. Though temporary if you keep exploring, loss of fruition from your intention often has a colour you will arrive at. Repeatedly. The feeling of loss of a good idea over-controlled or under-developed is often labeled “failure.” It has a way of gazing up at you resembling a putrid brown jumble of brushstrokes. “Unwanted Brown,” becomes known by painters as the “colour of control” for painters on their journey toward calibrating to more surrender. The courage to wonder takes practice of treating your perception with a light touch. Light touch on that habit of naming, judging and summarizing. Instead, adopting the habit of noticing the urge to name/judge/control and replace it with the weightless mind of a butterfly. This and other rebellious, disrupting choices are actually changing the brain from deepening an already deepened groove when you might feel the weight of a gravitational pull toward the known get a grip on you.

So I pause to take a look every once in a while. Don't love the compositional weighting? Turn the canvas until you can see something new. Then let it talk to you. Balancing something from a fresh perspective actually harmonizes. Does your piece have a heaviness to it? Is it trying too hard to BE something. Why not BE like water, or at least use the spray bottle and let water show you want beingness is again. From that, you will see, freshly, what is possible. This cannot be fully controlled. Believe me, you don't want to get stuck in the adaptation hell that is constantly correcting something that fundamentally wasn't that poignant or clear to begin with. The deeper the groove of “knowing” where something is going (conceptually or otherwise) is a trip up waiting to happen. One of the other personal joys from spending time in the painting studio is that you begin to see correlations on the canvas that are true of life itself. For example, the greater the knowing, the greater the risk of potential loss when you follow it, attach and find yourself way too far in a myopic tangent that the rest of the canvas cannot harmonize with. The spirit to aim for is curious enjoyment or wonder. Those compositions render a confident, organic and integrous expression.

I spend a little time assessing my best friend’s mood, her spoken intentions for her work today, and even the tone of her voice before selecting which of the next hours of songs to start with. Something told me to put it on shuffle, the variety would be a kinetic catalyst for not getting too stuck in a rut today. I turned on the stereo to my painter's playlist. It has accumulated hours of songs often without too many lyrics to interrupt your flow, other songs paint pictures of places I would love to travel or they have certain emotional landscapes that resonate with the child inside. Many delve longer than your average 4/4 time into an idea that can begin to saturate my awareness with a type of aural dance. When the percussion seems to pick up with a gust of wind, or a cartwheel through a field sort of tumbling, I let that momentum inside. I can feel it so potently that inevitably I find a centre point of neutral energy usage where my bodily movements and my energy level are at a perfect match. Never losing any energy, yet constantly in contact with a source of energy that seems inexhaustible. Painting is a catalyst for this experience of endlessness and even timelessness.

“I am feeling alive! I am going to go big today. You know, big risk, big release, big freedom!” I say it to her but also just to the room itself and notice then, that we haven’t even spoken more than a few words because we effectively dropped in. Now that is a good sign. The composition is the most confident and free when I let the colour talk to me. It talks to me in places, scenes even. I get to travel there with a brushstroke, sometimes a calling out for contrast here, a little rebellion there, the colour must come alive in my eyes to be finished. It has to look like how a good jazz song FEELS. Like every instrument has its moment to join the conversation, that with a bit of reverence from each musician the listening goes deeper. Great yogis speak of this listening, or absorption as the fruition of the practice of yoga. Your body, although coordinated to the tools of the trade, ceases to exist and experiencing pure consciousness occurs for some time.

She didn't look up from her 6 canvases displayed like a mosaic in front of her, she was in the zone. She jokingly cheered for me picking up on my rarely seen sassier attitude “WOOT WOOT you go girl!” Perhaps simply dropping all conscientiousness and enjoying the risks and taking pleasure in the unknown is where I feel the paradox of being comfortable in the uncomfortable. Paradoxes are such a source of humanity. Feeling human and enjoying that is a source of honest joy for me. In other aspects of life I may weigh my options with excruciating deliberation, but in my studio, my body is attuned to my eye and my emotions to colour such that I can dance in the canyons of the unknown and trust that magic is the next rational step after you announce “lets see what happens.”

We spent the next few hours responding to the spontaneous play of colour, line, texture and compositional language. We were swaying our hips, mumbling along with the lyrics and harmonizing with the melody. Momentum kept picking up, and inside that freedom I dropped in. Soon the host in me dissolved, the person with stories, the coach in me and the person who notices the old habit of pleasing all found rest in the background. It was our time to dance. Each of us, with our own canvases and inner voices calibrating, the music became fuel to our joy.

The rituals that start a studio session form a sort of pneumonic trigger for remembering and experiencing who you are which is a natural creator. Your tools are energy, focus, feeling and the ability to choose. It only takes one session in the studio before your cells do their fantastical memory magic and it is as if your very own release, promised in various other disciplines like yoga and meditation is simply captured, impressed into every one of the 30 trillion cells that decide to make you who you are. and you can always find your way back to that freedom. Here, where I have painted with many a fresh and seasoned freedom seeking humans it has been the rare more unspoken culture of the studio that does the freedom-making. Pretty soon whatever furrows the brow and tenses the lips from the outside world, quickly finds a languid, imperceptible moment that shifts into pure beingness.

Here, play is the peak of performance.

Here, the poetic visionaries at last achieve that synaesthesia, where you can practically taste your composition, hear your colours and stand messily rooted in your decisions as you navigated the rushing swaths of magenta, billowing blue and the delicate brushing into silken skies.

Here, the nameable components of a setting are not the aim. In fact, the moment you begin to see an object you can name, you must ask yourself, do I feel a sufficient world of emotional landscape for this item to exist inside of, and if so, is this nameable object allowing more of a feeling to fall into or is it now an obstacle to that feeling.

The goal? Stay in the feeling, commit, the orgasm is in the sensitivity to staying and exploring and devoting with utter and complete enoughness that the pleasure is the journey. All of this journeying on the canvas, is doing its work on the painter. The process of abstract painting is not unlike neuroplasticity itself. Instead of going to known pathways, there is a rebellion, a staunch commitment to curiosity.

What gets in the way? An idea that you must now achieve because it links to either what you know already -or- into who you think you are already. When you have one of those pesky identity thoughts, you want to switch your view super quickly, renounce the tightly wound obstacles that are self identification beliefs. As soon as one hitches to you, it's like velcro, soon everything else you think balls up and attaches itself with a death grip and you stop feeling the flow of energy, momentum and direction. Happiness is less found, rather it is created, induced, conditioned and a symptom of an environment where certain mind body practices occur, and I like them to be very hands off, almost spontaneous in experience. The craft of painting itself is very experimental, hands on, technical and yet can be felt so totally by the body. The mind eventually learns to trail behind stepping in only to make decisions that the body cues with its joyful, open YES moments and contracted NO moments.

We even ate a dinner that night made for royalty but we decided to eat it on the painting table. Devouring the scene with our eyes, I knew she saw it too, our salads were as vivid as our paintings. Our plates and drinks all compositions picking up on the light, each shining in their own intrinsic qualities while altogether appealing as a total arrangement. The joy didn’t end on the canvas. It was spilling out into everything. Our gratitude found words so easily picking up on all the beauty with a heightened sensitivity. It was as though our session was a vortex of infinite possibility, yet the simultaneous experience of doing (or controlling) absolutely nothing.