Painting - Playing - Moving

I traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia recently to jump into the Creative Music Workshop world. I offered my brush, drawing & listening practices to the students and joined the faculty concert to paint while these wonderful artists played and danced around me. 

Here are some images from the big visual that emerged.

I began by drawing a long horizontal brush line and then began to move to the music with bending reaching overlapping grass lines. 

 Touching the spaces with small strokes and tentrils of marks - 

The marks became wilder, wackier as the music grew more complex. 

landscapes began to take shape . . .

the grasses became layered, deeper, with eyes peering out.

Two dancers moved near me, responding to the forms I was making and I drew their relational bodies within the network of lines. 

 Their hands were reaching , gesturing - 

The left side of the painting was a confusing collection of marks until a saxophone solo guided me to create a spine which aligned and resolved things. Zoom in . . .

On the right the grasses were surrounded and penetrated by life . .

 And the whole painting at the end - 16 feet long - a record of aliveness.

Haiku View

I have been writing haiku for the past year, often just upon waking, looking out at the same view. Yet each day the sky changes, the tree moves through the seasons, and I am different. It has become a way to find myself in the world.

I have been working with the 5 - 7 - 5 syllable form. Being held by this constraint feels right.

Gradually, as the haiku have collected in my journals, I began to see brushstrokes joining them . Here is a small collection of what is emerging.

 

 

Mapping the Inner Lands

 I am participating in a six month global online course exploring The Spiritual Dimensions of Healing led by Thomas Hubl. During his monthly teachings I found myself creating images to represent the concepts being offered, something inside taking visual form - a graphic harvest.  

I share them here with some context . . .

Thomas spoke about new questions emerging and the sense of freedom in this process that ripples back and grounds and begins again. This brushstroke came forth -

 

He described the nervous system like a lightning rod - gathering light and energy -and grounded by who has come before . . .

 

There can be a perception that some people are less conscious and cannot take in these teachings. He spoke about this as transcendence without inclusion and offered a larger view, a way to create a bigger circle.

 

Thomas was describing a big stream of unbroken light that leads up to each one of us. I began to draw this river of beings. Then he was speaking about transgressions and the entanglement that creates for both and the freedom of restoration - within a relationship and inside each of us. 

 

At the end of a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Thomas, Bayo offered this image - a call - to step away from safety and move.  He called it the spirituality of the cracks. 

 

Thomas described the fragmentation of trauma. He said that through this inner work the pieces of text can come back into alignment and begin to make sense. This is what I saw . . .

 

In a live process session with a participant these images were offered and some simple settled shapes appeared on my page - 

 

A question was asked about how to join divine and grounded energies within ourselves.  As I drew this tree and painted the light within I felt my depleted state becoming restored and energized again. 

Pat McCabe, Woman Stands Shining, a Diné (Navaho) elder offered teachings on the support that we can draw on from the elements. She held up a glass of water . . .

She spoke about fire - 

and our relationship to the future - and the past - 

She described dropping back and back into the past holding a rope - which ended up here looking like a braid - 

Then Thomas Hubl in the next session spoke about elements of grace coming down and blessings arising. This is what I saw - 

 And the inner landscape that we each carry.