I became an artist painting in my mother’s art classes at the age of eight. At the same time I painted, I’d play with my paper dolls and let my imagination soar into stories of how my life would look when I grew up.
By the time I went to the University of Texas, I had a hard time choosing a major, so I majored in both Art and Writing. After college, I concentrated on my art and had some success with the enamels I made. I showed my work in many galleries around the country and won prizes in art shows. But I was never satisfied. There was always a gnawing for something more.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I know that the drive to write about my life was born out of a deep need to grow and expand. Actually, I’ve come to believe that we all have that mission, that it is something innate.
I recently finished writing a memoir, Tell Me What Love Is. The experience of writing my memoir helped me recognize my need to embellish myself with virtues and features that were not mine and taught me to recognize when I wasn’t being honest. I realized through all the self-deception I came across that I wasn’t feeling worthy or enough.
The next step in my writing brought me to being able to let go and receive ideas or imagine a new viewpoint with the resulting repercussions of that. I became able to “get into the flow” where I lost sense of time and space to create from a very elevated place, a place where I could conjure something new.
I saw this place as the Spiritual in Art. By allowing this higher vibrational energy inside me as I became closer to what I’d wanted to experience in my artwork. I was able to let go and to be a part of some extraordinary voice expressing through me, to feel my connection to the whole world and the Universe.
When I was younger, in the sixties, the conversation about the spiritual in art was only acceptable in the company of other artists. Mentioning it in the world I lived in resulted in making friends and acquaintances uncomfortable, so I felt split, like I lived in two worlds. My creative life was one of feelings and imagination and the other was a life based upon common sense. Slowly more and more signs showed that the two were beginning to merge, probably because the world is recognizing that we are all creative. As our creative side melds with our consciousnesses in this world, we begin to perceive how our imagination, our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and our psychology, all play roles in our well-being.
Now, with more turmoil in the world, all our past beliefs being questioned, our judgments eroding, we are being confronted with change and not knowing what steps to take next.
My blog is dedicated to making sense of these changes as it pertains to creating. Here I intend to explore how our rational minds sometimes block our ability to reach the spiritual in art. What can we do to move past these blocks? How can we hope to have the visions that inspire us without all the distractions?
I have had those visions before. You probably have too. What I’ll be exploring is finding that place where we will finally be able to connect more consistently with whatever it is that carries us to have the experiences we love, the place where we don’t want the experience to stop, and to never again allow fear and uncertainty to rule our actions.
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