Enlarging

As my eyesight weakens I am working larger.

This summer there were a number of opportunities to do this. 

At the Profound Treasury Retreat in Maine in June I offered my big brush practice as well as a drawing process working on the wall in pairs. . Here I am marking, moving and exchanging with my dear pal Linda Lauro Lazin - so much fun . . . 

I traveled up to Halifax in July and joined the Creative Music Workshop world. At the faculty concert I painted a long mural responding to the music and movement around me . Here is the whole creation - 

and some details -

and a video of Susanne Chui and Ross Burns moving, conducting, interacting with me - big play.

.At the end Susanne and I were on the floor writing in space with our hands.

  

In August I was part of the Bon Odori Dance Day for Peace in Kingston NY , an anti muclear event marking the Hiroshima bombing. Youko Yamamoto and I created calligraphic banners that were  raised up on Bamboo poles. They moved in the breeze. 

Later in August I collaborated with the callgrapher Asako Yamada at the Shape Leapers Salon in Rosendale NY. Asako worked on the floor with fierce gutsy brush marks as I stood and created a 3 line expression on a long length of paper. We passed the energy back and forth with music by Eric Archer and David Levy accompanying us. The words that emerged on my page were - 

                                                  In this time

                                                                earth strokes

                                                                               a deep land

Here we all are at the end with Asako revealing the theme of her mark making and this moment. 

                                                            How I live

Return to Guinea

I traveled back to this intensely alive place last month. It was my fourth time visiting in twenty years. My dear friends and teachers, Pam and Mimo Camara, hosted a group of women dancers from the Hudson Valley. We danced, made music, did batik dyeing, and connected with each other and this complex world of family, musicians and dance teachers. 

Guinea is a broken down world in many ways. Yet each time I travel there I also see it as whole at the core. People live with grace and dignity and love in the face of the difficulty. Experiencing this always opens me up. 

I also opened the sketchbook and looked out . . .

Here is the title page, created at the end of the trip to record the dates and encapsulate the time with a wax print of a radiating sun.  

In the tropics around the world the palm tree is always a good place to start loosening up the line and brush. My weakening eyes are allowing me to be more relaxed with my painting. 

Everyone went off to the huge medina market one morning. I had shopped there on previous trips and knew I wasn't up to its intensity, so I stayed back, sitting on the upper porch, finding beauty in the view 

 

Outside the walls of our compound these unusual trees were growing. I had seen them throughout India as well. I researched online their common and Latin names and Hindu meaning. 

 

I began to draw the musical instruments around us, starting with the bolon harp. I tried to fit it on one page and soon realized it had to stretch up much further. 

Here is our dance and drum teacher Mohammed with the bolon. See below for a video of him playing it with others.

 Next it was the Gongoma, a huge thumb piano. 

 Here I am drawing the gongoma and being watched closely- 

 And Mariama, one of our wonderful dance teachers, playing the gongoma - 

The balafon, a wooden xylophone, was left leaning up again the wall showing its underside. The small gourds strapped to the bottom looked like gathered fruit. 

We visited the largest baobab tree in Conakry. I stood under its immensity and had my picture taken. Back at the house I drew from the photo, listening to the balafon being played down below in the courtyard. Listen to a clip of this at the end -

Here are Pam and Mimo, whose love has created the space for all of us to experience this world. 

And me having a dancing moment with Djeli Kany, our longtime teacher and senior dancer with the Balletes Africanes. 

This was the world of music and voice and movement we were surrounded by each day . . .

 And here we are - all of us together in the aliveness - dancers - teachers - friends.

If you made it all the way through - and want to go deeper - here are my sketchbooks from previous trips to Guinea - 

Guinea Sketchbook - Part One

Guinea Sketchbook - Part Two 

Guinea Sketchbook - Part Three

Under the Mango Tree

And at the end here is Djeli Guinee our master balafonist and singer offering her heart -  take it in -  

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VATJgXNodly1-rJa-qgAV3SV0IWNK6A3/view?usp=drive_link

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.