This is the Place

My painting from 2000/2001 is now hanging at Lost Moth Gallery in Egg Harbor

This is the place where the land and water meet.  This is the place where the waves crash against your feet.  This is the place where shore greets sea.  This is the place where you become me.  
This is the place of diamonds and pearls.  This is where boys become girls.  Anything is possible, every dream is true.  This is the place where I become you.
This is the place of forest and sky.  You’re ready to live when you’re ready to die.  Love in between if you’re ready to cry.
This is where all weapons go to rust.  The place where anger turns to trust.  This is where night becomes your friend.  This is where your dream began.
If ever you are cast out with your fears.  Look them squarely with thy soul and it will bring you here.  Do not try to fight the waves of change.  Hang on tightly for your life and do not be afraid.
For this is the place where flight is made with broken wings.  This is the place where the mute swan sings.  This is how the question when becomes the question why.  This is where me becomes i.

Chance and Circumstance

When life hands you lemons, make something nourishing, and get stronger

It's been a long time since I've posted.  A lot has happened and I have not been in the right frame of mind to write about it.  When we are navigating through unexpected changes in our lives, all of our energy goes into steering the mothership.  It's been 2 weeks since my partner Dale and I decided to pull the plug on our brick and mortar business and it feels like it's been months.

I don't feel like it's necessary to dwell on the reasons our business isn't opening, the short story is this: a less than adequate building with an out of town landlord who didn't keep his word.  That's short, and WAY sweeter than it could be.  Life goes on.  And ours has, in a way that makes me feel like I'm swimming with the tide now, and not against it.

In the Winter I drew this to imagine the summer, now I am framing prints to hang in Lost Moth Gallery, Egg Harbor WI

In the two weeks since we decided to move out of the building I have been contacted by 4 business owners that want to display my work.  I have been busier than I could imagine framing prints and making new pieces to put into a local gallery.  I found out there were still some openings in a few Door County Art Fairs and am planning to show my work in person this summer.  The saying is old and cliche, but OH SO TRUE:  When one door closes...  The doors are many, not only doorways to new opportunities, friendships and experiences, but also the doors of the imagination, doors of possibilities, and of course.... the doors of perception.

New Clothing Projects: Find these at Olde Ellison Bay Days in Door County this June!

Of course I am happy to have opened these new doors to income generating opportunities; after all the bills don't stop piling up when plans change.  But my most exciting discovery has been the new ideas blossoming like the Trilliums outside my window.  For the past 10 springs I have been fully immersed in opening a retail shop for the tourist season.  This spring I have been at home, watching the forest floor explode into white, pink, yellow and green.  Today Dale and I listened to an Oriole calling hopefully for a mate all day long, when this evening the call was finally answered.  I noticed the subtle differences of green in the trees, the shifts in the wind, and a bird's nest resting on the fulcrum of a fallen branch.

I have had time to revel in the beauty of random events, and what they can lead to.

My day of marveling at nature led to an afternoon of creative outbursts, and I have begun to translate my experiences of the day into art.  A little assemblage...

I call this one Lone. 

And finally, I have the first exciting ideas forming for an interactive project using my painted stones.  Inspired and propelled by my interest in randomness and chance vs patterns and destiny, I am embarking on what will hopefully be a long term project affecting many friends and strangers.  There's more to come on this later, for now I'm referring to it as "Mystery Stones" and I am painting away!

Hope you like a good MYSTERY!!

For more information about upcoming art fairs, galleries or solving the mystery of the stones keep up with Dawn Patel Art on facebook, or join my mailing list.  Links can be found on this blog.  I hope you are all having your own creative rebirth this spring!

Finally, I have to credit Peter Malik for the title to this post.  It's an album I have been listening to for over 9 years.  That's right, we call those CDs these days.

For Every Thing, There is a Season

 

Close up of Painted Door...as of yet this is untitled

Painted Door

It's been the spring of slow beginnings here in Door County Wisconsin.  It's April 27 and it's a chilly 37 degrees today.  None of the bulbs in our woods have bloomed yet; we have just lost the last snow from the melting banks along our driveway.  Nonetheless, setting up shop for the Gallery season is on the agenda this week, for an opening on Memorial Day weekend.  The days of getting lost in painting all afternoon and reading and writing in the evening, if not coming to an end, are going to be rarer than busy days of business ownership.

It has me reflecting on balance.  Many of us spend a great deal of our lives trying to understand our lives.  My painting is my meditation, my vigorous practice where I find meaning.  Listening to archived podcasts of On Being with Krista Tippet today I listened to an interview with Brian Greene, "Reimagining The Cosmos."  http://bit.ly/1bMQQzP  At one point in the interview Tippett asked Greene if he experienced the relativity of time or only understood it through mathematical equations.  I was surprised at the answer.  He wholeheartedly believes the proof in the math that time does not have the linear and regular structure we understand it to have in Western Thought, it is the same equations that bring us our technology, our cell phones and our podcasts!  And yet, in his daily life, he does not experience time to be fluid, changeable and relative.  If asked if the past is over and the future hasn't happened he has to be truthful, that is how he experiences it.

I can't wrap my head around the math, but I feel that I am able to experience the non-linear nature of time.  Within the time at the easel there is "lost" time, and during those intervals of being I experience things differently than I do when conscious of time.  I "know" things I would not otherwise know and I can experience life differently, with a spaciousness that otherwise doesn't exist.  Perhaps seasoned meditators feel this way.  When I get caught up in the linear aspects of life, paying the bills, keeping up my online shop, shipping orders, and setting up shop for customers, the structure kicks in out of necessity.

I enjoy having a Gallery to open, am looking forward to seeing my regular customers and meeting new people, and set up is a fun creative project.  Meanwhile my time at the easel is going to be a fraction of what it was this winter.  And moving back and forth between ways of being is not always easy.  So how to find the balance....?

Wishing Stones.

I have more questions about this than answers right now.  I would love to hear what other artists do.  For now I have embarked on smaller projects that focus my energies into a specific idea, something I can meditate on.  They may not take my thoughts to the depths of my larger paintings, but they take me out of the cycle of work, production, and earning that we all have to do to survive.  It'll be interesting to see how that changes my ideas and work.

The Stones are characters in a larger story that I can experience individually.

Perhaps the seasons demand different ways of being, and the progress made in the summer season make it possible to do the expansive work of the winter.  I am pondering these things this week.

In Life As In Art

In Life As in Art: Lessons from the Studio

William Blake

"Behemoth and Leviathan"

c. 1805 - 1810 

I love the paintings of William Blake.  I don't share his religious sensibilities, but when I look closely at them I share something beyond the literal interpretations, into the vision.

Many people will marvel at his work but dismiss his genius as fueled by insanity.

Sometimes I wonder if the greatest insanity is the compliant acceptance of the culture we live in and the restrictions it imposes on our vision.

Look at a Blake painting for a very long time.  The next time you look at a flower, look for a very long time.  Look at another person's face for a very long time.  

Apply the same thing to your thoughts.  The next time you are contemplating an issue, look at it from all angles, look at your emotions as they form themselves around your thoughts and move them from side to side, shifting their very essence into something new... more tangible perhaps.  Or more accessible, more palatable, more digestible.  We blind ourselves to the truth of our own existence and shrink ourselves to fit into a world that needs to keep us small and obedient.  And it is safer to stay small than to expand into a space we are unfamiliar with.

   "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

                                                                                              William Blake  "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

Work in Progress from the Studio  (This one is mine)

There is a lot of insanity around us in this culture we live in.  And so little time to contemplate.  The Buddha told his followers not to believe what he said, but rather to go out and find the truth for themselves.

We find by searching, we see by looking, not for what we already know, but for what we haven't known yet.  And that takes a lot of time, an excruciatingly long look without turning away.  

Old thoughts need to be released in order for new thoughts to arise, and when we hold onto our beliefs and opinions we don't see what is before us.

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

                                                                                                   William Blake "A Memorable Fancy"

In life as in art, the experience is entirely up to us.  It just depends on how long you are willing to look and how wide you are willing to see.  The possibilites are infinite.  

Aftermath of Speaking Out: What Breaks Us, What Puts Us Back Together.

With every new painting I essentially say the same thing, "I Am Here."

This blog has become a public platform for some very personal topics.  I am driven by the belief that our most personal stories are in fact the most universal.  Everyone has their own way of making peace with life.  And that peace brings us closer to our truth. In truth we have no grand illusion to blind us from the incomprehensible mysteries of life. In peace we have no outside pressure to cause us to fool ourselves.  In my life I have found that true peace can only come from my own individual search and the lessons I learn, which come from a life of searching.

In the process of I confronting my past and facing the fears that had held me prisoner,
I revisited old letters, journals, and now I am revisiting another older painting.

Those of you who have been following my blog already know that a little over a month ago I wrote about my experience of domestic abuse, and the years of harassment that followed.  I was driven by a need for freedom, and I knew by speaking out about my personal experience I would be opening Pandora's box, in a sense.  I had no idea how it would all unfold.  What I was doing was opening a dam that had been holding back my own flow for far too long.  I felt strong enough to ride the tide and let it take me where it would.  A deep and hard earned appreciation for the logic of intuition in this life, a trust in life itself, was the only faith I had to go on.  I can tie these things in to my paintings, because it is often and sometimes only through painting that I understand my deepest feelings and thoughts.

The month that followed that post was tough.  I ended up filing a harassment/stalking restraining order and a few days ago, I won that in a hearing in a local courtroom.  The order is for four years and it doesn't guarantee my complete safety, but it secures my freedom to express myself in my own blog and other public forums without being harassed, frightened or bullied.  The fight for those rights meant going to court where I could legally and safely stand up for myself.  It was an essential step in the process of putting my pieces back together after being broken apart so many years ago.

Sometimes the events of our lives fracture us.  In my case, I had split into two, and each half co-existed.
A sense of detachment, a shadow self, prevented my connected self from fully participating.  

Healing, as I now understand it to be, is not a return to what we were before.  We cannot stay in one place and we cannot go back.  What we move into is our choice, but so often we go through life unaware and half asleep.  We make excuses, we blame, we escape into distractions.  Being fully awake means to acknowledge all the sides of ourselves, even those that have been neglected, disavowed and overlooked in the struggle to keep up, move on and live life in the world as we know it.

When the reality of my own life became too painful to face, I escaped.  This does not mean I became bipolar.  I chose, not knowing it was a choice, to sometimes not "be here" while going through life.  It can best be seen as stepping back, letting life unfold but being somewhere else in your mind.  So many of us, the childhood dreamers, know what I mean by this.  My mental escape became more extreme, and a convenient hiding place when unwelcome emotions surfaced.  Fear, anger, anxiety, sadness... they were unwelcome.  What happens when you push these away is that their counterparts, joy, love, peace and bliss also move into a murky space where thay are inaccesessable.  Because the pain of the loss of my son drove part of my self into a private and safe place, the other parts of my life missed knowing all of me.  I can feel regret, for how long it took to see what had happened, but regret is a backwards road full of pitfalls.  This is life, it is messy.  It is a series of questions that just lead to more questions.  But it can be entered into everyday with open eyes and a recepetive heart.  That is the truth of life I had missed by escaping.  

In the past four years I have become increasingly withdrawn from the relationships in my life as I entered
into a "cocoon" phase.  This was a necessary step towards understanding my own boundaries
and gaining the self reliance and acceptance to assert these boundaries.

What I now understand as the "cocoon" phase, a time of intense introspection and hermetic isolation, has been a wonderful experience for me.  It required many hours at the easel.  Although I had to pull away from the world in order to access my subconscious and begin the healing process, my family and most friends have understood and given me the space and freedom required to turn inward.  There I found the strength I needed to see my own life with open eyes.  The confidence I gained from these recent years has been exactly what I needed to recognize what a violation the harassment and stalking have been.  The courage I had gained made it possible to assert my rights without further fear of retaliation.  I know I have to live my entire life knowing safety is not a guarantee, this person who violated me may at anytime act out of anger.  I have prepared myself for this possibility, and a big lesson for me was that 90% of that preparation is mental.  Our minds can be our strength or our weakness.  It takes a strong heart and a disciplined mind to face a dangerous world.

As I paint this autobiographical painting that I started three years ago, I give form to all of these abstract ideas.  The gestation of my heart in it's cocoon phase, the splitting apart with two significant events, the birth of a child and the death of another.  The incubation of a self-realized identity that arises from the wounds and divisions caused by violence.  The images all arise, situate themselves in the context of a human figure, and I organize them.  I highlight some while glazing over others.  I reflect on their existence.  I acknowledge their purpose in my life.  A swan symbolizes the unseen world, the parts of life where intuition and trust are needed most.  A pair of eyes peering out from my brain, the self reflection and honesty needed to repair.  A grieving mother, a watchful mother, and a hand with a weapon.  A victim, a protector, a survivor.  A heart, a mind, a past and a future.  All the pieces that are put back together, a familiar but transformed and unified version of self.  

Being awake inside of oneself is the now the only option.  It is a the key that unlocks the cage,
the prison so many of us live in.  A cage with a key that has always been there.

 With every new painting I essentially say the same thing, "I Am Here."  It seems an odd thing to do.  I wonder if it's really what we are all doing, all of the time, and I have just found the way that works for me.  I don't feel a great sense of belonging to any particular group, religion, race, social caste or political organization.  As I grow older the purpose for my own existence becomes something that only I can unlock and live.  More social people might think it seems lonely.  But I'm not lonely or unfulfilled.  Those who seek validation in fame or riches would be disappointed.  I have a roof over my head and I eat three healthy meals a day.  I paint, I live my life and I face each problem that presents itself when I'm ready.  It feels like an integration of the broken parts, and it brings me great peace.

At this point in my life the studio is my workplace, my place of therapy, my place of peace.
I am happy here and that is never something to take for granted.

Healing and Art: The Truth Will Set You Free

"The Way Home"          Finished Painting

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.  Life certainly gets interesting when you are truthful with yourself.   Somewhere, deep inside our subconscious, where no one else can give you directions, where no teacher dictates right from wrong, where no dogma, definitions and simple answers can exist, there we can find the truth.

I began a strange and very interesting journey this month when I decided to write about my painting, "The Escape" in a post titled "Victim no More, Silent no More." (03/10)  Circumstances beyond my control compelled me to write about my own experience of domestic abuse and the therapeutic way it appeared in my art, revealing to me my suppressed emotions and memories.  Writing about the painting, I exposed myself to public scrutiny with my own issues, many of which have been subjects of pain, shame and fear.  I could not have foreseen the encouragement and insight that would bless my life as a result of the simple act of telling my story.

A close up from "The Escape"    There is a struggle and conflict in my heart and my mind, as I give away my power.

In the original painting, I appear in several forms.  One of these is a dog.  I allowed myself to be treated like one.  This is how it feels when you have lived through an abusive relationship.  And so many of us stay, like a dog that returns to an owner who beats it.  It is a dehumanizing experience, and looking at it as a part of my own personal history filled me with shame.  I think of myself as a strong woman.  Because I had memories of allowing myself to be treated in this way, there has been a fundamental disconnect in my own definition of self.  It lead to a certain lack of honesty in everything I did.  It split my self image into two parts, the one I cognized and the one I suppressed.  In the original painting I am the dog, but I am also a bird fighting the dog.  The figure who represents my abuser has his fingers in my head.  The suppressed self image remains in this passive dog-state without power and without a real form.  It is skeletal.

In reworking the painting the fingers get pushed out of the dog's brain and the dog and bird metamorphose into a new creature.  This new image of self is not perfect, but whole and united, with yet to be realized powers.

When I approached this part of the painting and saw what I was denying to myself, I started to remember parts of my life I had pushed aside and buried for so long.  Some were horrific acts of physical and sexual violence.  Others were moments of shame, when I supported my abuser and his actions with my silence.  When I met him I was 20 years old, and I was a naive and idealistic young woman who was in a state of constant rebellion from the world I was raised in.  I grew up with privilege, but I knew the world was unjust and was unable to accept it.  I spend so much of my teenage years battling my father and anyone who considered themselves a realist.  In my mind accepting the world as it is, unequal and unfair, was nothing short of treason to a higher sense of justice.  My youthful idealism met many obstacles head on, and an undeniable one was the injustice of my own middle class childhood in a world where many have so little.  My childhood starkly contrasted the world of poverty and violence my abuser came from.  His pain pulled at my guilt as much as his violence transformed my innocence.  That was the initial dynamic.  He showered me with praise and adoration, while reminding me of my shame: my birthplace in an unjust world.  When his behavior shifted from "sweeping me off my feet" into violence, rage and blame, I was left mute and paralyzed, like the dog on its back in my painting.  I was dependent on his affection as the only redemption for my guilt.  If I left him I only proved him right, life was easy for me and hard for him.  I did just that and I never found a way to address that fundamental conflict in my mind and heart.  How quickly and easily I went from rebellious teen to submissive victim, never leaving either completely healed.  It has been a truth of myself I refused to admit.  It has been the suppressed spilt.  I couldn't bear to see myself with that kind of unflinching honesty.

Facing my fears means facing shame, regret, and things I haven't wanted to believe about yourself.
It has made it possible to transform.  The transformation helps me feel courageous, powerful and honest.
I am becoming a person my idealistic teen self would have looked up to.

Since I started writing about this experience I have received vicious backlash from my abuser, I have been able to finally get a temporary restraining order signed and served, I have found inner strengths I didn't know I was missing, and I have been reminded, over and over, that I am not alone.  I have been added to a directory of healing artists, been highlighted in the local paper's e-newsletter and been asked for permission to share my stories with social workers and their clients.  I have sometimes stayed home, too tired and confused to face the world.  I have established healthy boundaries in all areas of my life.  My paintings have reached a deeper and more dynamic level, acknowledging the dualities of dark and light without judgement.  I have found a voice within me I didn't know could be so raw and honest.   I am moving beyond the classifications of abuser and abused.  We are all victims until we heal our own internal divides.  Only then can we understand healing in the world outside of us. 

I have never mentioned the name of my abuser and I never plan to on this blog or any public forum.  And yet he has revealed himself.  I was unable to get papers served by the police, but he showed up to confront me and was surprised by a Sheriff with papers.  The ironic and fateful way my story keeps unfolding as I do nothing but tell it with candor has given me a new faith in justice and fairness.  I do not accept injustice, but I am waking up to the realization of the divide, that creates it.  I can live without hidden shame and suppressed pain.  I can be my best, and that is what we owe to life, and to the world.

Everyone has a gift. Nurture It.

"The Escape" is now "The Way Home"

This painting is still in progress, but I felt the urge to write a short but hopefully sweet post reflecting on where I'm at in the process.

 Since posting the post "Victim no More" I have been asked if I need therapy, a guru, hypnosis… I appreciate the concern actually, all caring questions from caring friends.  But it seems to me what I need to do is just to continue painting.  When I'm painting the questions present themselves, the memories arise, the emotions resurface.  And a visual language I have spent over 30 years developing helps me to see these memories, feel the emotions and begin to process answers to questions I have until now been too afraid to ask.  It feels like a miracle.  It is certainly a gift.  I am incredibly grateful.

If you have a gift, all I can say is this: continue to exercise and develop it, even if you feel short on time and energy.  Just a little when you have time is better than nothing.  Some years I only had a few weeks out of the entire year to wholeheartedly attend to painting.  I'm so glad I did.  Nuture your gift, let it be important.  The unique way your gift will reveal its meaning and purpose in your own life will someday be clear.  Have faith.