Evolving Art

I have recently been reading a group of inspiring books that I've chosen as a means to awaken or recharge a new level of creativity.  As part of my art practice, at my mentor Andie Thrames' suggestion, I have found it is necessary to review my mission as an artist every six months or so.   This is not only for my own awareness and growth, but so that I can communicate about my art and process in art statements and in sharing creative enthusiasm with others.  To keep myself engaged and charged I have to participate in my education by reading, attending workshops with artists that I want to emulate, and by interacting with art to discover what speaks to me. 

There are four books I'm loving right now in which each author is talking about our interconnectedness.  David Abrams, ecologist and philosopher, speaks magically in Spell of the Sensuous about the history of our disconnect from nature and our inner nature due to the refinement of language and written communication.  Through Abrams mystical descriptions of feeling nature and the ways indigenous cultures view themselves in nature (which is express it via storytelling), one is reintroduced to a once common communion with nature.  This book has philosophical depth that I can sometimes only digest a paragraph at a time.  It is rewiring my mind's concepts about perception.

Meditation is been part of my way of becoming more perceptive and aware my interconnection and inter-dependence with nature.  The nature of our minds is nature.  We are nature.  This isn't new to Buddhism.  The Harmony of Emptiness and Dependent-Arising: Tsong Khapa by Ven. Lobsang Gyatso elaborates on cause and effect in relation to emptiness.  Once again I am reminded of the fault of ignorance and how ignorance of the ultimate nature of phenomena leads to every choice we make.

As I continue absorb the teaching-words in these books I find that something is slipping or softening in how I perceive phenomena.  I listen for the ways nature talks to me and I look for the eyes that are seeing and perceiving me.  I wonder how it is that we humans think we are bigger than and dominant over nature.  Poet Gary Snyder writes so captivatingly in The Practice of the Wild on the wild that we are.  In Snyder's introduction he writes, "A key term is practice:  meaning a deliberate sustained and conscious effort to be more finely tuned to ourselves and to the way the actual existing world is.  'The World,' with the exception of a tiny bit of human intervention, is ultimately a wild place." (p. viii)

It is in this wild place that we live and create.  I have recently been introduced (by Sue West) to the art work of Enrique Martinez Celaya.  A well established and visionary California artist who paints, writes, lectures, educates and inspires others to delve deep and reconnect.  His work is profoundly spiritual from a scientific and globally philosophical view.  In Collected Writings & Interviews, 1990-2010, Enrique Martinez Celaya, taken from Celaya's manifesto, he writes, "It seems more sad than ironic that in the process of mastering our destiny through technology and global reach, we have lost our respect for nature and our sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves."  Celaya sees the artist role to be that of a prophet.  It is with that inspiring idea that I explore and contemplate his work and the works of others engaged in nurturing our awakened minds.

The image above is from my series of painting on California butterflies.  There are over 120 species of butterflies that live in the Sierras according to Dr. Art Shapiro, professor of Evolution and Ecology, and his UC Davis research team.  They have a fantastic website http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/ with images of each butterfly.  The butterfly represents for me the ability to transform.  My mixed media pieces evolve in an intuitive process of cooperating with the art materials, the subject matter, patterns, and contemplative mind frame.

May you be well and inspired!

Susan