The Healing Power of Art: To Look Without Turning Away

Painting in Progress.  The Escape is becoming a new painting.  I'm still not sure  of the new title.

I posted my last post ten days ago.  It began with the phrase "Victim no More,"  and when I wrote it I knew that would happen, but I didn't know how.  As I move along, I have learned if I try very hard to be honest with myself, my actions will continue to lead me in a direction that helps me to be the best I can be.  It is a destination that is far from the attainment of perfection; it may never lead to material success, and it will not make everyone like me.  What I do believe is that unflinching honesty to oneself is the only reliable guide in a fluid, ever-changing approach to life without a roadmap.

Sounds simple, but it's been the most challenging approach to life that I have found.  And it is the most rewarding,  if what you're striving for is to feel fully alive and present in your own life.

Anyone who read my previous post knows I recently opened up and told my own personal story.  As a survivor of a very violent and traumatic relationship in my early 20's I have struggled to regain my strength and power throughout my adult life.  Painting has been a vital tool that has helped me to understand my subconscious thoughts and suppressed feelings, and communicate them first to myself and finally, to my family, friends, acquaintances and even strangers.

There have been consequences to telling my story.  There was immediate retaliation from my abuser, in the form of comments.  I have been feeling exposed, both emotionally and physically.  Many of my fears have surfaced, not only in my painting, but in my life.

Facing my fears one by one and looking at them  long enough to understand them completely.

In the center of the painting I have discovered my fears, as each one unfolds.  I have been afraid of being physically harmed.  Being verbally attacked in such a public way by my abuser was not something I predicted, but it has always been a threat and a fear.  I was afraid I would be seen as a weak person for having even been in an abusive relationship.  (I was afraid I would be judged in so many ways.)    I was afraid of remembering what I have pushed aside.  I was afraid of so many regrets.   I felt ashamed, scared and anxious, but I wrote down my story and I posted it publicly.  And the fallout has been huge; for ten days every single one of those fears has sat down in front of me and beckoned to be seen. 

As I painted the visual manifestations of my fears I felt each one acutely.  I tried to see them through to their worst case scenario.   It was exhausting, but they are losing their power over me.  I am seeing the strength in vulnerability, the courage in taking chances and the power in honesty.  I have begun to realize that certainty is an illusion sought out by fear.  I have also learned that fear cannot be escaped by running or hiding.  As I paint, I literally FACE MY FEARS.  And they become known to me, and I regain power over each one.

      In order fully own our own lives we must fully participate.  To do this well we must
have boundaries, and our boundaries are our own to define and defend.

Boundaries have always been an issue for me.  I would venture to guess anyone who has been in a relationship where they were physically violated has boundary issues.  But just as challenging for me are emotional and psychological boundaries.  In the past few years I have begun to realize and assert boundaries, often with very little grace and a lot of clumsiness.  It's a learning period.  I intellectually understood my abuser had no right to contact me, by phone, email or Facebook comments.  But in order to emotionally understand that truth I had to feel my own boundaries.  This took time.  When I began to publicly tell my story I took a quantum leap in boundary setting and my balance was very shaky at first.

Fortunately for me I have had a few really strong foundations in place.  I have a solid relationship with a supportive partner who understands me.  I have friends who cheer me on, even if we have moved to different places and rarely see each other.  I have family members who support my choices with respect and love.  And I feel more and more safe.  Safety is never guaranteed,  but I am secure in my preparation and planning for what I consider "worst case scenarios."  If I felt isolated, alone or ill prepared, I would not have told my story.  Speaking out can, at times, be dangerous.  Each person must decide carefully.  It is not realistic to think it is always the right thing to do, but when the time is right, it is a choice that can give victims ownership of their lives.  That is what it has done for me.

Returning to my own life I weep tears for the times I have been emotionally absent.
There is a bittersweet blend of sadness and hope in seeing your life with clarity. 

Although I am learning that my boundaries can enable me to be vulnerable in many areas of my life, up until now I used the creative process to feel things fully and give those feelings and experiences form.  This has been my lifeline.  It is one of the most valuable things I have to offer from my life.  I know how to tap into emotions I have vaulted up and left in darkness, experience them in the present and give them symbolic form with line, colors and shapes.  A lifetime of thinking through pictures is now making so much sense.  It has led me to where I am, and I am excited to continue discovering what there is to be known in this life, through the visions in my paintings.

Victim no More, Silent no More. The Healing Power of Art.

The Escape

This is the story of the birth of a painting, but it is much more.  It is the story of life events that nearly destroyed me.  I was not destroyed, but these events followed me.  I moved from place to place, but they were never far behind.  I tried therapy, but they returned in the night.  I grew strong and confident, but they lingered in the corners of my world waiting for a weak moment to pounce.  I built a life for myself, but they built a wall around that life, keeping my fears in and real intimacy out.  This is the story of domestic abuse, abuse from an intimate partner. One of the most insidious and terrifying forms of violence, it is one of the most common.  And it is a story of a painting that has been my way of breaking down my walls, the real and the imagined.  
Two years ago, almost to the day, I awoke with my pillow soaked with tears.  I was still weeping as I awoke and recalled the dream.  I was at a party, a farewell party for a young man at work.  He was loved by everyone there, so when he announced he was leaving we begged him to stay.  He insisted on leaving, so we decided to throw a farewell party as big as our love for him.
At the party we drank and sang, and danced to live music under the stars.  Each person had a dance with the young man, and I was the last.  When I danced with him I held him so tightly, and I wept a river of tears.  I felt like I would not be able to let go.  Finally he held me back at arms length, so he could look into my face and tell me that it was all OK; he loved me and I had to let him go.
When I woke up I knew the young man was my son, who had died in my womb 22 years earlier, after I was beaten with the handle of a hobby horse.  I was beaten with repeated blows to the back, until the heavy wooden pole actually shattered into several pieces.  During the beating I twisted and turned, exposing my back in an attempt to protect my 6 month pregnant abdomen and the baby inside.  A month later I delivered a fetus that had been dead for over three weeks due to causes not completely known, but assumed to be strangulation by the umbilical cord.  This has always been my dark night of the soul.  And I am bringing it into the light.

I would like to say this was an isolated event, but it wasn't.  I was 22 years old, in the final month of a relationship that had lasted 2 years.  I was soon to run away and find safety in a women's shelter. Slowly I began to put myself back together in a life of my own, but at that time I was the shell of a person.  A person who had become a captive in a prison with no concrete walls, but rather walls of fear and manipulation. To this day, I cannot understand or even fathom the undeniable strength of those walls, made of blocks that were harder to shatter than concrete itself.  
Some people may believe that when an abused women leaves the abusive relationship the torment is over.  Yes, the worst of it is.  My own experience of leaving this relationship was in many ways a second chance at life.  I had escaped the brutal world I was trapped in.  I had a one year old baby girl who kept me going.  I had camaraderie in the women's shelter, where I was given the love and attention I had so missed in the years of isolation and abuse.  I eventually reconnected with my parents and my two brothers, and, with the support of my family, I began the long road of recovery at the age of 22.  But one reason so many women stay in abusive circumstances is because they believe the threats.  Most threats end with a promise: if they leave the brutality will be even worse.  It is not words that make the threats real, it is bloody noses, black eyes, and worse.  It is the monstrous way a sadistic person can weave lies through the brain of his victim.  I believed I would be hunted down, and possibly killed.  I believed this for so long, that even when my rational mind had worked through the unlikelihood of such an outcome, every cell in my body seemed to still believe it.  It didn't help that in the many years since I left, my abuser has continued to try to connect with me, sometimes with a twisted gesture of friendship and sometimes with condemnation and demands, but always uninvited, unanswered and unwanted. 

I awoke from the dream two years ago, almost 24 years after the day I entered the women's shelter.  I awoke weeping.  I had said goodbye to my son. Still in my pajamas, I walked downstairs and picked up a painting I had begun a few days before; it was one that had baffled me.  I put the painting down on the kitchen table and picked up a paintbrush.  I knew exactly what I needed to do. 

This is what the painting looked like it when I started painting that morning in my pajamas

When I paint a large painting I usually go through a stage of confusion, when I'm baffled or bewildered by the marks I have put down. This is not unusual.  What, if anything, was unusual about this painting was how angry I had felt while working on it.  At best I am usually challenged and inspired by this stage, at worst I am irritated.  I recognize the feeling and I know it's temporary.  This painting actually made me mad.  But that morning all the anger was washed away and I was mourning.  Suddenly I felt like I understood something very profound about the events of my life, and it was all symbolically taking form in this painting.  

I started "The Escape" as I do many of my paintings on boards, with collaged images.  I glued a print of mine with a dog and bird in ambiguous conflict, pages from the New York Times and pages from Tolstoy.  I thought I was painting about ideas, as I often do.  But the images that kept appearing were too personal for me to connect to the social and political content of the collaged scraps.  A figure appeared, looking suspiciously like my abusive partner from 24 years earlier.  He reached out long fingers that shot right through the head of the upside-down  dog.  A mask that looked like a demon from a dream looked over it all and a Thunderbird appeared that seemed to be flying off the page.  I say "appear" because at this stage in the painting I am not painting with any premeditated brushstrokes, I paint without forethought.  I am as surprised by what comes off the brush as any bystander would be, often more so. 

A close up of what happened that morning

I painted all morning and well into the day, without eating or getting dressed or even cleaning up.  There was a force driving me that surpassed any other needs, and it was the force of healing.  When I painted this piece I truly understood the transcendental healing power of art.  Pi is a transcendental number.  It is real, but not algebraic.  It does not have rational roots. If you try too hard to make rational sense of it all, it disappears, like the memory of a dream.  When I painted the section that most pained me, the one where my abuser stuck his fingers into my head, comforting images appeared to soothe me.  My daughter and my son were soon part of a vortex of circular movement that emanated from the source of my pain.  I saw the good with the bad, healing as an outgrowth of suffering.  One cannot exist without the other.  If you let go, it will be OK, as my son told me in my dream.

On one side, the dead infant leaves the thoughts of the abuser as a mere outline, almost a caricature.  He is in the bottom left corner of the painting, where the pain and deception of the past events weave imprisoning webs that eventually grow into a brick wall.   But the spirit of the baby boy emerges on the other side of my abuser like a rock formation, his leg turning into a wing that becomes one of the wings of my living child. My daughter is the one who was my only reason for living when, lost in the darkness of abuse, I considered suicide.  The left side and especially the bottom left corner of the painting are the beginning of the story, they are real events, but they are the past.  I will never forget the past, but I have to fly away.  

At this point I find myself in the painting.  I am flying away.  I am as far away as possible from the painful events, but my flight has also taken me away from those I love, it has taken me away from the center of the painting where my story is told.  In my desire for freedom from the fear and the pain, in my usual enthusiasm, I have gone too far.

When I realized where I was in the painting, I also realized I was connected to a pair of legs on the other side of the Thunderbird.  And holding onto the foot was a figure seated on a horse.  He has white hair.  I realized who he was and I was a little annoyed.  I can laugh now, but I was really irritated by this.  It was very difficult to let a man into my inner world, although I had attempted to have relationships in the last two decades.  I had either chosen unrealistic, unattainable partners, or I had pushed or pulled at the the men in my life, until the relationship fell apart.  No one had made it into a painting like this.  But the work I was doing at this point was exhilarating, and the white haired man on the horse was a person who gave me a lot of space, and was someone I considered trusting, something I had previously found impossible.  So eventually I was able to accept the goofy turn of events in this image.  After all, there was someone holding me back from completely flying away.  A good thing.

One thing I love about this process is that it can be so serious, intense, even frightening; yet it can be lighthearted, playful and irreverent all at the same time.  I have learned to accept all aspects.  I have learned to let go.  There was a moment, somewhere around two in the morning, more that 18 hours after I got up and started painting in my pajamas that I found myself leaning over the painting and screaming through tears, "You had no right.  You had no right to do the things you did!"  I was lucid enough to realize if anyone walked through the door at that moment they might be concerned for my sanity, but believe me, it was one of the sanest moments of my life.  It was the moment I released the rage inside of me for over two decades and with the rage went the fear, went the walls, went the prison I had been living in.  My catharsis was the result of 24 years of hard work, practice, patience, and all the stuff of life, but it came down like a crashing wall, and it took form in a work of art.

By the time I fell asleep, 20 hours after I started working that day, the painting was nearly complete.

I went to sleep that night as the sun was rising.  I had ended the day laughing through the tears, a day that began crying into my pillow.  There were finishing touches to be done.  There were parts of the painting I still did not understand.  There are still many walls around my heart to be torn down.  I could not know, that night two years ago, the profound effect that day's work would have on my life.  The therapeutic value in art for me is the potential for understanding, control, and release, all through the language of painting.  

Two years later I am revisiting this work.   I am actually making a printed canvas to save it in this stage, and I am taking it back to the easel, realizing now that I am armed with the truth and the absence of fear and shame.  With these tools I can see areas of the painting that are clearly unfinished, and I now feel ready to complete.

Releasing the past through creative work has proven to have a key role in my ongoing growth, most importantly releasing my fears.  What I dealt with in these past 26 years has been the stalking and attempts at communication from my abuser.  I had a very difficult time shaking the fear and damage that resulted from extreme abuse, and the inconsistent, incomprehensible nature of his attempts to insinuate himself into my life have never ended.  But years went by, and I am stronger.  I have armed myself with protection, material and emotional. My paintings, which over the years have become a diary of healing, help me feel less controlled by the past, and therefore, less threatened.  I can honestly say I am no longer afraid, but I am still not free from the unwanted attention from a past I have let go of - a man who has relinquished all rights to be in my world through his own actions 26 years ago.  I have realized that nothing I do or say would define this boundary more than the truth.  The most empowering aspect of my artistic process in this piece has been the courage to tell my story.  The truth, it is said, will set you free.  And now that I no longer feel the need to run away, I am claiming the right to be free.

Buddha Pages

                          Being a seller on etsy requires more than talent, creativity and passion.  It is a very competitive marketplace where one must consider most choices with asute business sense.  Because I have been moving away from my life as a business owner and back into the studio, I often struggle with the double edge sword of self employment.  The work is hard, and I still have to make choices that are smart from a business mindset,as well as inspiring to my artistic mindset.  Creating an affordable art piece that is unique, one of a kind and inspiring to the viewer is a challenge, but one I am beginning to enjoy as an important part of my artistic journey.

The Buddha pages are a new idea I brought to my etsy page as a way to combine the lessons I have learned from creating products that sell well on etsy with the projects that are on my table and close to my heart.  I have been sketching flowers, animals and images derived from my studies of Medieval art this winter as preparatory and preliminary work for my large paintings.  The sketches at times develop into finished pieces in their own right.  I offer prints of many of my drawings and paintings, but I wanted to come up with something more.  When I'm at work on a painting I so often rely on chance, or what at times feels like serendipity, to bring the meaning of an image into focus.  

Combining the images from my sketchbooks with pages from a vintage book is not a completely original idea.  Artists print on found paper, especially in the world of assemblage.  The personal significance for me is the particular book I chose.  I have spent many hours sifting through old books since my father passed away three years ago.  He was a voracious reader, and he loved to share everything he learned from his books.  Many of my memories of family vacations at our northwoods cabin getaway are of my father either reading on his recliner or asleep with a book on his chest.  He was so happy with his books.  I don't read nearly as much as my dad, but I do love books and I have had a keen interest in Buddhism in the past year, reading everything I can get my hands on.  So, going through my dad's collection, the text on the Buddha's life, "Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism" 1969, has been the perfect choice for a backdrop for my sketches and studies.   I love to layer an image full of symbolic meaning with a page that somehow relates to the image, inviting further contemplation.  When I look at them now I see them as small versions of the layering process I meticulously work through in my multi media painted works.

Adaptation

I invite readers to check out the Buddha pages on etsy.  Each one has a special meaning that I begin to explain in the listings, leaving the rest of the discovery to each viewer.  At the top of this page is a link to etsy, it will take you to the shop: Dawn Patel Art, and the Buddha page section can be easily found there.  

Beneath the Snow

I would love to hear what meanings you discover in these small and precious pages.

Layers: Time, Space, Memory, Patterns, Connections, and Movement

The bird without feet flies to the tree without branches

I have been painting in layers for so long now I can hardly remember how it all started.  Ironic, actually, because to me layers are all about time and memory, our experiences and how they sometimes fade, brighten, change, recede, collapse and even disappear under the weight of time, new experiences and sometimes even the strength of our own will.

The beginning stages of this painting consist of a mixture, a paste made of equal parts determination and chance.  I chose the drawings that I cut and paste based on my recent studies of nature, tying them together with past drawings with themes of individuality, strength, power and freedom.  Not knowing yet where all that would take me I added some pages from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on the theme of space travel and nuclear fusion with a vintage map of the Southern US, focused on New Orleans.  

Like most of my paintings, I was thinking about relationships, both the connections and the tension between the world of nature and the world of humankind.  In this case I was most concerned with energy.  Our willful energy and it's effect on the earth and on nature is one theme arising, but also the energy of our hopes and dreams that lies under the surface, the subtle forces we impose on events without even knowing.   Sometimes the outcome is not what was planned, but it IS the the sum of the parts that went into it.

While I was cutting and pasting I accidentally cut the feet off of one of the birds and decided to glue them down as separate pieces in different places, not connected as they were previously.  That evening Dale and I watched a film called "Pariah,"  (recommend it, by the way) and the main character in the movie, a teenager struggling with issues of identity and belonging, writes a poem, one of the lines going something like this... "the bird without feet always flies to the tree without branches."  I'm probably not quoting verbatim, but you get the idea.

This little bit of serendipity fueled a newer and more complex meaning in the painting for me, how movement can be a restless never-ending quest for a landing that does and cannot exist.  I spend a lot of time marveling at the spontaneous eruption of movement when I'm painting, and this movement is crucial to the overall content in the painting.  That is, the moment keeps you IN the painting, while it also keeps you from staying in one place. 

The preliminary stages: drawings and vintage book pages

Halfway through this painting I am discovering the meaning inherent in it from the beginning while simultaneously defining the meaning by the marks I make as a result of those discoveries.  Ah, a parallel universe, working through the processes of life itself in a creative act.  Few things, in my mind, are as rewarding.  I layer in order to cover, uncover, highlight, remember, obscure.  All the same things I do with thoughts, actions, words… but how I love to do it with paint.

Some areas are raw, even becoming more raw as the painting progresses.  Some areas are detailed, specific, ordered.  Some fall into chaos.  All is somewhat controlled, but never completely.  There are patterns that arise and patterns that fall away.  There are synapses and there is punctuation.  It is constantly in flux, to the point that I can only arbitrarily, or maybe intuitively, impose an ending at some point, out of necessity.  But through it all meaning evolves.

Fot this particular painting the meaning is poignant.  The bird without feet is autobiographical, while the relationship between nature and nuclear physics is based on observation of the world.  The result is an inquiry into the process of finding ones place in this world of natural laws and the laws of man.  And this inquiry is fascinating enough to me to get me into that studio again tomorrow for another day of work, another glorious day of painting.

Spirit Helpers - Arctic Peoples

Close up from "Spirit Helpers- Arctic Peoples"

Last December we were settling into our new life, working daily in the studio and living in a small house in the woods in Door County Wisconsin.  It happened to be an early, and somewhat snowy winter.  The studio is in a very open area; being a farming region, we are surrounded by fields.  The result is a view out of my window that often looks like the arctic tundra, snow blowing across a palette of white, gray and blue, with a backdrop of a dark tree line and big sky that often calls me to the window at sunset with its breathtaking and bone chilling beauty.

When a friend from Europe contacted me with a request for a commissioned painting I was thrilled of course, and when she told me she was fascinated with Arctic Peoples and culture, I had to marvel at the serendipity.  Looking out my window, I thought I already have a great deal of inspiration in my daily routine.  So began a long distance collaboration of ideas between Brussels, Belgium and Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, connected by gusts of snow and the howling of the bitter wind.

Research and Inspiration

Before embarking on a new painting I spend a little time hunting and gathering.  The inspiration that Kerstin felt from her new found fascination and attraction to Arctic Life opened the door to many possibilities and directions for research.  I started with a gorgeous and sparse film called "The Journals of Knud Rasmussen," an Inuit Film that opened my eyes to the qualities of Arctic life that I have come to deeply admire. http://www.isuma.tv/en/isuma-productions

After watching the film, I contemplated the harsh day to day realities of Arctic life and the pared down and elegant cultural solutions to these challenges developed in Inuit culture.  I dove further into the concept of Spirit helpers and Shamanic Culture, an aspect of the film that I loved.  An online search led me to the work of Abraham Anghik Ruben, an Inuit carver whose work and life story I won't get into here, but would urge readers to investigate, not only for art, but also for the lesson in history: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/abraham-anghik-ruben-the-intermediarysculptor-carves-inuit-legends-of-his-heritage/2012/10/25/6fbbaf12-1d5d-11e2-b647-bb1668e64058_story.html

After a week or more of reading, watching, and reflecting I had my own ideas forming.  The physical and spiritual life of the Intuit ignited my imagination, the all too common damage caused by the introduction of Western culture and it's colonizing mentality dug into my heart, and the cold winds outside my window haunted my dreams.  I was ready to begin.

The three levels of existence are beginning to appear.

The Blood and Guts: Paintings have a life of their own.

My painting immediately began to evolve into three levels, and I saw, in my interpretation of Arctic life, three very clear experiences of reality which, unlike our Western experience, are not compartmentalized.  The levels of existence: the human world, the natural world, and the spirit world are all very intertwined and interdependent.  My personal belief is that, despite our Western dichotomies, this is always the reality of experience.  In the vision of Inuit Life I have captured they are all one, and working together with elegant grace.

Images of a Swan Maiden, fox spirit and a canoe as a vehicle of transpiration between the worlds are my own iconography, a symbolic language and story that developed while painting.  Although not directly borrowed, the symbols and characters that arose were very much influenced by Ruben's Sea Goddess and the spirit helpers in the film.

Color, texture and pattern: Sun and blood add life to the monochromatic landscape.

During the weeks I spent painting this piece, Kerstin and I occasionally emailed each other with thoughts about the painting.  I shared my discoveries and she sent images and ideas that inspired her.  Although the exchanges were brief and arrived over the tangled web of the internet crossing an ocean, it seemed as if our minds were meeting in a way that transcended words.  I would describe it as a meeting of not just minds, but of hearts and souls.  The serendipity continued to inspire new developments and strengthened my trust in the process.  Doing a commissioned piece is not always easy for an artist.  Expectations can hinder creative thought and and outside influences can muddy the clarity of the process.  I am fortunate to have had very good experiences, I only take commissions if I feel the buyer loves the innate qualities of my work, not just the superficial formal look of it, and he or she does not have a restrictive definition of art.  Each painting has a life of it's own, and when it is a good commission, it has two minds behind it, working together.  And when this happens it's magic.  I often charge less than my customers expect for commissions, because to me these projects are a gift, and a shared effort and experience.

Finished Painting with fabric backing and bamboo rod.

Technical Issues

The final issues with this piece were technical, how to ship this Belgium without adding hundreds to the price.  I solved this by sewing the canvas to a large piece of fabric.  I chose a Batik from Ghana in deep blue and gold.  The African pattern and colors worked so well with the painting I had to chuckle.  A little symmetry between continents, pulling us all together.  I added leather loops on top that support the entire piece with a bamboo rod.  When Kerstin opened her shipment all she had to do was unroll it and hang it from a couple of nails on the wall!

She emailed me to tell me she cried when she saw it in person, and it hanging on her wall it felt like it had always been there.  What an amazing experience for both of us.  I couldn't be luckier, doing what I do.

In the middle of painting this I had a little story arise.  It captures, for me, the essence of this experience.

Fox speaks to the swan maiden. Both are protected by the sun spirit. Fox tells the maiden, "you are going to grow up and forget, but never forget. Those who have grown up do not know everything. They have forgotten more than they remember."

May we all find ways to remember.  

Work in Progress: This is the Fun Part

Intermediary: Work in Progress

It's fun to talk about a painting in progress, sometimes for me more enjoyable than talking about a painting after it's finished.  Once the work is finished, everything has been decided.  At that point I'm much more interested in hearing what the viewer has to say, what an individual walking up to a painting for the first time sees, interprets and understands.  

At this point… I would say this painting is nearly half finished, but it's impossible to say for sure, mysteries can still unfold, meanings can show themselves and changes can occur.  I can still have an "aha" moment when the meaning of this painting suddenly goes deeper, or takes a turn I never expected.  At this point I have, in my mind, an pretty general understanding of what it means, to me. 

SPOILER ALERT!  

If you wanted to wait and interpret my painting for yourself before being influenced by my intentions, stop reading now.  I am going to write about what I began to see in this painting, on the second day I worked on it.  

When it began I had some general ideas going into the image.  One was the idea of forces of opposition. Conflict.  Dichotomies.  I used a drawing of a bird and a snake in an attack/defensive struggle.  I also had an image of two creatures facing each other, also in attack/ defense mode.  One is a deer-like creature and the other has computer keys for teeth.  The third image I used is from a Medieval Alchemy text and it shows a bird facing downward with a rope in it's mouth.  At the end of the rope is a large stone.  From it's feet a scroll of paper unravels.

The three drawings, all torn from my sketchbooks, are drawings I have done in the past of things that interest me.  They represent concepts I enjoy trying to understand, ideas that help me make sense of the world.

I began painting by trying to visually tie together the images with paint while thematically tying together the images with new and larger images in the paint.

By the end of day two I found myself with a painting of a sleeping figure.  The meaning of the painting is beginning to reveal itself.  In the center is a seated Buddha-like figure.  He has technology - all that is man-made on one side of him and spirit/nature on the other.  Like the snake and the bird that surround the sleeping figures' head, these two creatures are in a fight- one has an aggressive stance and the other a defensive stance.

At the sleeping figure's feet is the bird, attached to his toe.  And the same foot that holds the bird with its' toe carries a large swan made of stone.

In the center of the painting is the Buddha-like figure.  His eyes are closed and his arms are wrapped around him like a straightjacket.  A tear falls from his eye.  The figure whose sleeping body stretches across all of these images also has his eyes closed.  The bird at the foot end of the figure drops the stone.

To me this painting is about being asleep.  I think it's something human-kind is very guilty of, and I do not excuse myself.  We are here in these bodies witnessing the essential nature of life, but we have our eyes closed and do not know what our roles are, perhaps we are even trapped.
The images in the painting imply that perhaps one of our roles is that of the intermediary between these worlds that seem at this point to be in opposition.  Whether or not they are truly in opposition is a question… is it a result of our sleeping that the conflicts exist, or do we sleep to avoid the conflicts?

I once had a dream, and in the dream a fatherly guide said, "The ones who know why they are doing what they are doing will control the technology."  Today listening to one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Heather Martin, I heard her say, "Know what you are doing."  It seemed to fit.

Perhaps I paint these to teach myself what I need to learn, but in the meantime, I hope I paint something that also gives pleasure to others.

20 Days in the Life of a Painting

Phoenix: Finished Painting

I love to allow the viewer into the day to day excitement of making a work of art.  My style of painting has developed over years of practice and trial and error, evolving into an idiosyncratic intuitive process of layering.

This is the first finished work I accomplished in 2014.  I feel very aligned with the universe with this one, the cocoon - butterfly theme combined with the Phoenix rising from the ashes captures a mood that seems prescient.  Although it seems moody or even dark, to me it is a painting about evolving, about growth and action, and relationships in motion.  I feel a triumph and connectedness within the images, and the dark and the light are both necessary.

I'm starting with the finished Painting, not to ruin the surprise, but rather to give you a step back after seeing the final product.

It's such a rewarding experience to create one of these, I hope you the reader can experience some of the delight with these images.

Here is the very beginning, Day one.

Day One             

I love the first day of a new painting.  Nothing has become a struggle yet, it's pure play.  It's almost impossible to make a mistake or have a critical eye about my work in the very beginning, because it is a journey into the unknown.  All I have to do is be receptive and dive in fearlessly.

I began this painting with a Moth image I had drawn in my sketchbook, a timeline from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and a diagram from a agriculture textbook illustrating irrigation techniques.  The tiny image on top is a Mayan image, a god, I believe, throwing a comet.

These seemingly random images actually all seemed connected to me, and they set the stage.

When I applied paint on this day I primarily thought about connecting the images.  Although the connecting is mostly just through design, I also began thinking about how they literally connect.  Humankind's relationship with nature, often a theme in my work, was the overwhelming response.  

Days Two through Five

               

Adding both broad areas of opaque paint and detailed areas of drawing (Both with paint and with fabric that is drawn on with Sharpies then layered into the image) the story starts to take on a life of it's own.  New Characters arise, seemingly out of nowhere, and take their place in the drama.  Some of the images that started to appear in this stage surprise me.  The skull and the fish were completely unplanned.  But most of all I was delighted by the appearance of the winged human-like form that showed itself to me at the top of the painting.

When I talk about these developments, I speak as if they happened without my doing.  Of course that's not true, but in a strange way it's accurate.  I painted these images, but I did not plan them.  Often I paint something and step away before I even realize what is it.  I'm sometimes very lucid and sometimes in a trance-like state where time is lost.  Those are fun, I have complete trust in this state of mind, my "painting state."  Whatever happens make sense to me at some point in the process of creating each painting.  There are attitudes and frames of mind I have to maintain while working in the middle stages of a painting, primarily revolving around the concept of "Being true to the painting."  I let the painting itself direct my choices more than preconceived ideas I have about it.  It is a zen-like intuitive response of complete honesty and trust in the process that I often try to carry over into the rest of my life.

Days Six - Ten

                

During the Middle stages of painting I add a lot of paint.  Actually the first of these three images shows a new layer of dark oil pastels, draw over the acrylic paint, which will be worked into future layers of paint.  (Very hard on the brushes, I use the cheap tattered ones for that)  Sometimes during this time I cover entire sections and then decide it is too much and bring back some of what was covered.  I play with color, try things out and change them over and over.  The painting changes daily at this point and sometimes goes back and forth, looking more like it did two days ago.  It is a struggle often at this point.  I may have said I hate this painting a few times at this point.  I don't really hate it, but I do get frustrated with the tedious work of finding the best combination of elements to work together in the image.  A layer of dark oil pastel lines blend with bright colors… a layer of dry brushed whites add dimension, cool colors push back, warm and bright colors jump forward.  It's still fun at times, rewarding at times, but it feels like work more than ever at this stage, a necessary part of the evolution of am image.

Days Eleven through Sixteen

                     


 This particular painting went  through these stages of development more than any I've ever worked on before, that is why I am so happy to share these stages with you.  In the second and third week of painting I often said, towards the end of the day, "I think it's almost finished," only to make major changes the next day that required more and more hours of painting.  During this time I added new colors, a layer of a transparent cool colors and lots of detailed patterns in the solid areas of color that I had finally settled on.  The detail in this piece required sitting over my work table for hours.  I had to do a lot of stretching after studio time!  After a few more days the painting was finally finished, as far as I can tell.  The first image on this post is the final result of all this work.

 For me it is a labor of love, every moment is worth it and rewarding in the act itself.  I am hoping to be able to sell these paintings and others, as well as prints of the work I do this winter.  This painting is available for sale as a print, as well as other printed merchandise on Society6: http://society6.com/DawnPatel/Phoenix-djT_Print#1=45
If you are interested you can copy and paste that link and check it out.

I hope this was enjoyable for fellow artists and/or art appreciators.

I haven't touched upon the ideas and meaning in the work in this post intentionally.  I try not to sway the viewers experience.  I think the individual reading of the work is as important as the intentions I had while making it.  I will post one day in the not too distant future an explanation of the ideas and thoughts that are behind my work… stay tuned.