June 2, 2015 – The spirit of Kauai

A lotus from this morning’s walk. A future painting?

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I first came to Kauai about this time of year in 1997 for a friend’s wedding. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency – a beautiful, lavish resort on the south shore. I had United MileagePlus discount coupons for this hotel – it’s funny how accidents of circumstance can end up changing our lives! I had been back a year and a half from Paris and hadn’t yet met Joe, so I was here on my own, amongst lots of shiny wedding bands and families with small children. My friend’s wedding was in a garden along Hanalei Bay on the north shore and we went to a luau on the east side – giving me a taste of a lot of this lovely island.

The next time back was two years later. Joe had just finished chemo and we were looking for a vacation spot to start his healing. He’d been to Maui, but never Kauai. My first trip here introduced me to Kauai’s rhythms – peaceful and soothing. We stayed in an end-unit condo with a sweet, private little garden, walking distance from the Hyatt where I had stayed. We discovered a hike along the coast, starting at Shipwreck Beach in front of the Hyatt. The web of trails head east along a bluff, with amazing views of the ocean and the south coastline of Kauai. We hiked every morning and then came back and talked, really talked. His journey through cancer treatment started six days after our first date and the next six months were a whir of emotions and the realities of cancer treatment – infusions, a hospital stay, injections at home, many restless nights. In that little garden condo we took the time to share with each other at Kauai’s pace.

Journeys through life-threatening illness shift things in us – after cancer, Joe resolved that we’d come to Hawaii often. Since then, it’s been at least once, many times twice a year. Except for one more trip to Maui and another to the Big Island – both in the following two years – every trip back has been to Kauai. In 2004, on a whim, we walked into Island Pacific Properties in Koloa town and met the broker, Stephanie. We left that trip having taken a big risk – we’d made an offer on a house! It’s always been someone else’s home, we’ve never furnished it so that we could stay there, but owning a house on Kauai has anchored us here even more. What seems more important to me is that through Steff, we’ve met so many wonderful people. When we come here now, we see old and new friends. It’s so much more than a vacation spot.

Because we really love sunshine, we’ve always stayed on the south shore. I’ve been here 10 days now and I’ve not ventured any further north than the airport in Lihue! Our time here is spent “trying on” retirement. We’ve always stayed in a place with a kitchen, so we can have meals “at home” if we want. We still do the same walk along the coast, but now we know to look for sea turtles in the water and often go all the way to the next beach – Mahaulepu – and go for a swim in the spot inside the reef break. On calm days it’s almost like a swimming pool. Joe golfs and I paint, we read and do a whole lot of not much else. There are many treasures on this island we’ve yet to experience, but somehow we’ve lost the impetus to be explorers. What we come here for, more than anything else, is to just be.

I take walks along the shore from the Hyatt headed west sometimes too – and take pictures of the tropical flowers in the lush gardens of the resorts and vacation homes. So many of my paintings have come from these walks.

It’s been interesting to watch things change: new condos have been built in some of the empty spots, run-down places re-done and the gardens change too. For some reason, every year for the past five or so, the water lily ponds are going away. One year there are no more plants, the next there isn’t even any water in them. I don’t know if they are too much to keep up, but I’m so glad that I have been able to capture them in paint! None of the ponds I’ve painted below exist anymore.

As I mentioned in my post about “home” a few weeks ago, Kauai is one of ours. It has me wonder what it is about a place, the spirit of a place – that meets us, compelling us to come back again and again, developing a relationship with the place that is as real as any relationship. As I write this, I’m in my friend Robin’s studio – in her house in Kalaheo – a bit up-country from where we stay closer to the ocean. She paints beautiful, color-filled oils of this heavenly place. I love having a real artist-friend here. We inspire and support each other in a way that, somehow, I’ve not found with anyone at home. She’s working on a painting of a succulent, finding her way through the shapes and colors and I’m taking a break from struggling through the lily pond painting I’m working on to write to you. Coming through the open French door are the sounds of the breeze in the palm fronds and the calls of the tropical birds – including the roosters – and even the bleat of a goat! This is absolutely paradise.

We’ve talked about living here full time – even as an adventure for a year. So far, the pull has not been strong enough to up-root us from Northern California, where we were both born and our lives are still centered. Nonetheless, there is something here for us, that lives in us when we are back “home.” When we went to see the George Clooney movie, “The Descendents” at the Fairfax Theater, we felt it. There is a scene where his character flies with his daughters from Oahu to Kauai to see the family property. As they are walking in from the jet-way into the Lihue airport, I felt in me and sensed in Joe a combination of recognition, knowing and longing. We felt Kauai in our bones for a moment. This place fills a need in us that isn’t filled anywhere else – even in the very-special place we live.

Saturday night we went to the salt ponds to watch the sunset. Joe was curious what the people were doing a short distance away. Following his intuition, we went to check it out. His respectful, reverent way of asking about it inspired Emma, a native Hawaiian to take the time tell us all about it. She’s the third generation that has been tending the salt beds – the only ones on Kauai. We saw how they carefully re-make the beds with smooth black mud every year and then carefully bucket the salt water from the wells into them. The sun evaporates the water and in a number of weeks salt crystals form, which are then gathered up and dried. Her son and niece and grandkids were there, participating in the traditional practice, carrying on the knowledge. When I asked if they sell the salt, with pride and honor, she told me they only give it away. Then she gave us some of her pink salt from last year – white salt that had been mixed with Hawaiian red dirt. She told us this salt is medicine.

The clouds were spitting rain as we left, feeling like we had just been blessed. It’s still not coming to me how to articulate what it is about the spirit of this part of this island that we connect to, but it so does. We are renewed and inspired here. The air is soft on my skin. Thank you, Kauai.

Aloha,

Cara

May 19, 2015 – Windows to the soul

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For some reason, I’ve been really resistant to wearing glasses to read, even as my eyes are going through the aging process that affects nearly all of us – I’m becoming far-sighted. I put off wearing drug-store cheaters to read as long as possible – until sometime after I turned fifty. And I still often go without them – squinting to see, which means sometimes I’m lectured that this will wrinkle up my face. Maybe because I’m a visual artist, maybe because what I most want to impart to the artists who come paint with me is that they can expand their capacity to see, but I’m preoccupied with vision!

Sometime last year, my dad was diagnosed with early stage macular degeneration. He was advised that all his children over 50 should be tested too. I went right in to have my eyes checked out. The optometrist found a few very small drusen on my retina, which I was told was normal for someone my age. But then later that day – a Thursday – I got a voicemail from her. She said she upon review of the photos taken, she saw a small hemorrhage on my retina. A small hemorrhage? I tried calling back, but missed her and was told that she was out on Fridays. So I spent the weekend wondering what it might be like to not have my eyes. Not only does eyesight offer us freedom and independence, but it is color and light and allows me to make my paintings! Then, I went to a Speaking Circle and realized the connection between human beings that happens when eyes meet – so much is conveyed across space from one heart to another through our eyes! I’m guessing that vision-impaired people connect hearts in other ways, as the other senses become more acute. But the thought of finding this out first-hand was crushing.

I went back to see what she saw. When the photo of my retina was expanded so it was larger than the 14” monitor, the “hemorrhage” was about the size of the head of a pin. Ok, so I’m not going to get all freaked out about that tiny thing. Whew. But the brush with the possibility of losing my eye-sight has me even more tuned in to seeing.

I was online one evening about a month and a half ago and saw one of those ads, like the-5-foods-you-should-never-eat-again. It was 10-minutes-a-day-for-one-week-to-regain-20/20-vision. It hooked me, I bit. I watched about 25 minutes of the infomercial video before the hype-i-ness of it wore me out. But I got enough information to start an online search. I found out about what’s called the “Bates Method.” Dr. Bates was an ophthalmologist, who, in around the turn of the last century, began developing exercises to help people improve their eyesight without glasses or surgery. An important aspect of this work involves resting the muscles around the eyes, which relieves strain that impairs vision.

I bought a book on it and have started, sporadically, to do some of the exercises. I’ve been almost entirely without my cheaters for over a month now. My near vision is still blurry, but it has improved slightly and I’m amazed at how I can see well enough to read – without squinting – which is itself another form of strain. One of the things they suggest you do is, when walking or driving or moving through space in some way, to look through your peripheral vision to see the trees, bushes, buildings seem as if they are in motion. When I do this, it’s as if I’m staying in one place and the rest of the world is moving by me. It’s the coolest thing! This has given me moments where I experience the three-dimensional nature of our world very acutely. On a walk with Bo in our neighborhood I saw a big tree and the space it occupies, almost as if it’s a holograph.

All of this leads me to the possibility that I can shift how it is that information is received in my brain through my eyes. It’s as if I’ve been seeking out, hunting even, visual input. What has developed is the desire to simply allow it to enter, in a more passive – yes, even feminine – way. It’s quieter, more meditative and it brings up another of the distinctions we learned in the leadership program I wrote about last week – particles and space. We spent an entire retreat attempting to focus instead of on the particles – the “things” all around us – to focus on the spaces between the things. In art it’s the “negative space.” In the big tree it’s seeing the distances between the branches as they go up and out into space. But this can be difficult – “things” captivate us – they really grab our attention with their “being-ness.”

I’m finding this challenging to articulate. It’s a shift in perspective and perception that’s hard to describe, but I’m compelled by it. I am curious as to how it might change the art that comes through me. I do know that my ability to see what’s really there, in a reference image, or in real life, has grown immensely through all these paintings I’ve done. It’s also what I most want to invite in other artists in their learning process.

Our retinas transmit 10 million bits of information every second to our brains – wow, every second? In order to not be completely overwhelmed by this information, our brains have a filter that processes that information based on what we have already seen, what we believe and value. Quite often, I watch us – yes, me too – as we make our paintings – we make decisions in color and shape and brush stroke based upon what we think we see. It takes slowing down, resting our eyes on what we are looking at, to allow what’s actually there to go beyond the filter and register in our brains.

The first time this really crystalized for me was when I was painting “Fauchon Eclairs.” My inclination was to paint the shine on the chocolate glaze a lighter version of the dark chocolate brown. But something stopped me. I made a hole in a piece of paper and put it over the shiny part of my reference image. It was a violet blue! Ok, so I trusted what I saw and painted it a violet blue. No one has ever asked me why I painted it blue, or even noticed for that matter. I can look at this painting and shift my vision from seeing shiny, brightly colored pastries to seeing abstract shapes and colors. Can you?

When I first started really painting, I noticed this shift happen all the time, even when I wasn’t trying to make art, but just going about my day. I’d see the light on a leaf and wonder how I’d paint it – or clouds, or the shine on the hardwood floor. Now, I hear the same thing over and over, from people who are new to painting, too. We really notice what is around us, even without intending to. To me this is a waking up. It’s a paying attention in a more careful and reverential, and even honest way. It makes me wonder how much our capacity to see can keep growing and what that might make possible – not just in our art-making, but in our lives. And it has me profoundly grateful for these incredible organs of perception – our eyes.

Love,

Cara

May 12, 2015 – Failing and recovering

My world-class commute!

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When I came back from my stay in Paris in 1996, I settled back here in a house in San Anselmo (in Marin) and worked in San Francisco.  I either took the ferry across the bay to the Ferry Building or the bus across the Golden Gate Bridge.  Not too shabby either way as far as commutes go!  I remember warm evenings in the summer sitting outside on the boat, watching the city draw away from us, feeling the magic of the uncommon warmth (it’s often windy and chilly in the summer on the Bay).   And in the winter, I liked to get a window seat on the left side of the bus, so I could watch the sun set out over the Pacific Ocean as we headed north over the bridge.  I thought to myself:  people travel thousands of miles to see this – and I get to see it all the time.

By about 2003, after meeting Joe, getting married and going through unsuccessful fertility treatments, the magic had worn off.  I remember saying to Donna – who was officially my “therapist” but is what I’d truly call my God mother – that getting on that bus felt like “slamming my soul against a concrete wall.”  I was searching for something else to do for work that would keep me on this side of the bridge. I suggested one day that I could do bookkeeping. To that she said “you are a teacher.” (It is such a gift to have people in our lives that see who we are before we do.)  She pointed me to CTI – the Coaches Training Institute.  She had another client who was going through their program and thought I might be interested.

CTI is one of the best coach training organizations in the world and they are headquartered right here in San Rafael.  I went home and read the curriculum on their website and knew it was me – working with people as they grew into the lives they were called to live was where I wanted put my energy.  It took a couple of years before I started – April of 2005 – a decade ago!  When I was in the third of five courses, one of the leaders saw something in me and asked me to consider doing CTI’s leadership course.  It’s a 10-month, nearly $10,000 program.  Holy cow!  I was scared, of the time and money commitment, but also of what it would ask of me.  I was still gripped by that stage-fright!  I started Co-Active Leadership on my 44^th birthday in November 2005. The “me” that emerged in the next 10 months can never go back inside the box she was held in.  It expanded my consciousness, my sense of self and my impact.  I learned the value of my voice and my point-of-view and the power of creating in partnership.  It’s an amazing program.

We learned practical distinctions that I still call upon all the time.  I’ve been thinking about one of them a lot lately – recovery.  We learned that the deal is not to avoid making mistakes, having missteps, going off track. The deal is how we recover from them.  Through high-ropes exercises with a partner, we got in our bodies how even dangling helpless from a rope, there is a way to pull back up and get going again.  And, that it almost always takes the help of others.

Recovery is not just what we do, it’s a mind-set.  If we expect that things will go awry at some point and we take responsibility for the situation, we have a whole different set of capacities to handle it.  If we hide, deny or crumble under the challenging circumstances, it doesn’t go so well.  It’s hard to do. Our egos don’t like being responsible for what goes “wrong.”  It’s called failure – in our heads and outside them too.  We are geared toward success, but we need to “fail” to be strong.  Even more than that, it’s how it goes in life. We will fail.  We can learn to see failure as a means to learn and grow.

I’m incredibly inspired by Alison Armstrong’s commitment to recovering well.  When she and her husband or other partners in her life “blow up the laboratory,” as she calls it, it is her commitment to work through what happened between them so fully, gaining all the learning and insight from it she can, so that in the end she’s glad it happened. This is recovery in the spirit that we learned in leadership! And it’s given the world Alison’s work – which has brought freedom, understanding and peace to thousands and thousands of relationships.

Of course, these days I look at almost everything through the lens of creativity and how I can be a better teacher.  I am largely self-taught – besides a few workshops and adult ed classes, I learned to paint by finishing every one of my paintings.  When I hit a spot where I thought I’d ruined it, or when it just looks so awful to me that a voice tells me it isn’t worth continuing (and this happens with every painting – still!), I’ve stuck with it and figured out what it needed.  Sometimes help comes from my reference image.  I say to the painters in my groups “we are not slaves to our reference photos, they are our servants.”  The photo, to the best of the camera’s ability, captured the light, the color, the shapes of our subject – in the moment we were inspired by it.  To that end it can be instructive to us in our painting process.  So, I compare the photo to the painting which tells me what’s needed.

I’ve learned to be bold.  Painting Reach! several summers ago, I left the sky for last. I envisioned a smooth lovely wash of blue, but it was a warm day – it was drying fast and ended up all splotchy.  I panicked that I’d ruined it!   I took it out on the metal patio table, got a 3” house painting brush from the garage, mixed up several blues and a violet and slathered the paint on.  Here’s the before and after.  What I ended up with was a “life in full color” sky, and a much stronger painting than if I’d been “successful” with the pale wash.

With August Bounty, I didn’t have a good drawing of the ivy – the image was dark and I couldn’t see to draw it well. I tried to make it up as I painted.  What I had painted was so bad that, though I had ¾ of the ivy painted, I put the whole piece of paper in the kitchen sink and sponged it off.  I dried it flat, took a new, lighter photo of the ivy, re-drew and re-painted it from the start. That’s recovery!  There are some green stains that can be seen through the tan-colored paint over to the right (see the detail photo) – which I think actually makes it a bit more interesting.  And – that I’ve done this has made me a better artist and a better teacher.

I joke often about offering a workshop called “Can this Painting Be Saved?” Artists would bring the work that is tucked away because they don’t like what they’ve done.  We can’t be sure that every painting is one to be “saved,” but based on my experience, I’d bet many are.  And our creative capacity expands by even attempting it. This is the real gold to be mined.

Whether it’s a tossed aside painting, a relationship that’s hit a bump or – for me – the eternal desire to take better care of myself, I’m banking on the creative capacities that lie in committing to recovering fully.  I invite you to join me.

Love,

Cara

April 28, 2015 – A home for the unwanted

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I just finished another painting and part of me can barely stand to look at it and call it mine. This part of me worries that I got the shadows on the rose murky, the yellow is too intense and brassy.  It tells me parts of the leaves are clumsily painted and the background is unrefined and messy.  After all these paintings, which have received such generous appreciation, you’d think that I’d be more able to take pleasure in the results of all the work I put into them!  There is a pattern which has revealed itself in my relationship with my work.  As I’m painting and when I first finish it, I have to force myself to not just see all the parts that vex me.  They stick out and grab my attention – though there is another part of me that sees my work more holistically. This part knows when I’m on the right track and finally, when the painting is done. At this point, I take it in to be scanned (for giclee prints) and to be framed.  Framing art always does something. It elevates the art and provides me with just a bit of distance from the hyper-intimacy when I’m in the middle of painting it.

Then it takes sometimes a few months to start to forget all the places in the painting I struggled, making a space in my perception to receive the spirit of it – I can begin to appreciate in it what the rest of you do.  I’ve had the experience of opening some of the high resolution scans on my computer, of paintings I’d done some time before – and zooming way in, where I can see it even more closely than when painting it – and I actually fell in love.  I took joy in the colors, the edges and shapes of the washes and passages and its essential abstract nature.  It’s an entirely different state of mind than the one I had when I put brush to paint to paper to make those shapes.  It’s even hard to fully get that I was the one who made these marks.

I’m fascinated by this whole process. We, the art-makers have this, in some way, unenviable position. To make the art, we must operate close in, right at the point of creation.  This place is messy and uncertain, and the voices in our heads chatter about what we are doing.  I hear them all day long on Thursday and Friday in my painting groups. There is judgment and uncertainty in each of us, to varying degrees, that is absolutely unrelenting.

Maggie, a perceptive and thoughtful woman in my coaching group posted this, written by Matt Licata, in our Facebook space last week:

“You want to share your joy, your happiness, your peace, and your love with others. It is so natural to want to uplift those around you. Perhaps the greatest gift you can give to another, however, is your willingness to provide a home for the unwanted within you.

For when you are in direct contact with your own grief, loneliness, rage, and confusion, an attuned field of love emerges in the space between, granting an ancient permission for the ‘other’ to finally meet these unresolved energies in themselves.

Look carefully and see the subtle burden you have placed on those around you to compensate for the longing of your unlived life. To re-own this burden may be the greatest act of kindness you can offer this weary world.

It is by way of this holy re-embodiment that you will be crafted, cell by cell, as a pure, alchemical vessel in which the wildness of love can emerge here.”

When I read this, I found it so beautiful and consoling.  A home for the unwanted within me – I think this is part of what I was talking about in my post about “home” two weeks ago. It also speaks to what I’m exploring here.  I don’t really want the part of me that picks apart my art in process. I’d rather be free of it, thank you very much!  I’d rather the art making process be blissful, peaceful easy – just the pure joy of playing with colors and making shapes.

And this is just one of the “unwanted” parts of me.  There’s the part that lost her temper on Friday, and did the unthinkable – snapped at one of the painters. I’d much rather have a sweet and even temperament all of the time.  I don’t want the part of me that is so eager to cram all that she can into each minute and doesn’t leave enough time to always be on time. I’d rather be actually early, arriving calm and ready for anything.   I don’t want the part that really, really craves sweets in the evening, which can wreak havoc with my mid-life sleep patterns. I’d rather be happy eating only healthy, good-for me foods, 100% of the time.   My grief at not being a mother, my frustration with the things that bug me about Joe, my unwanted list goes on…

Writing this has me see how silly it is to “unwant” any part of me.  To have a whole range of parts and emotions – wanted and unwanted – is to be human.   So then, what does it actually mean to “make a home” for what is unwanted in me?  What comes to me when I ask myself this question is, practicing noticing these parts when they show themselves, realizing that they are “unwanted” and then practicing letting go of the idea that any of it “should be” any different than it is.  All of which will – hopefully – allow me to soften towards all parts of me and not interact with others when these parts are running the show.  Ultimately, what I’m feeling called to is to be able to claim these unwanted parts as mine.  Open-heartedly including them as me.  Of course I will not do this perfectly, which creates a repeating loop, start again with noticing the unwanted parts…

This is just what I’ve learned to do in painting.  If I took direction from my fear and judgment about how it is going in my paintings, I’d never paint!  I’m determined to paint in spite of this chatter – which is just one way to live my life accompanied by what’s “unwanted within.”  My hope is that as this capacity grows in me, and I can name it for artists who paint with me, it ends up having an impact on others – in the studio – and out. And as each of us does this, the world evolves.  My sense is that it’s slow work and progress isn’t easy to observe. It’s only upon reflecting back in time that it’s revealed how the ability to be with what is has grown, and more and more lightness has settled in – for me, this is what Matt Licata calls the “wildness of love” emerging.

Love,

Cara

March 31, 2015 – What has us step up and commit?

A photo I took, over the top of a fence on my tiptoes!

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Today marks six months of writing a post to my online journal every, single Tuesday.  Through the holidays and the busy times and the weeks I thought I had nothing to say, I’ve found something and I’ve written and posted.  Yay to me!

I celebrate this mini-milestone because I’ve spent the vast majority of this life thinking I am not a writer.  (I shared with you my history with writing and why I write in a post late last year.)  I also celebrate this because I’ve been telling myself a story that I’m not a stick-to-it person.  I love to start things, but the discipline of seeing them through has not been something that comes naturally for me.  I have no problem committing to marriage or a job working for someone else, but when the only consequence is that I let myself down, it has been a whole other story.

I would have thought there would be no great fallout if I just petered out on posting every Tuesday.  Well, that is except self-induced shame at having an abandoned blog.  Encountering such blogs – where the last post was years ago – and that story about my lack of discipline – have kept me from even starting.  Until now.

Yesterday I read a recent Seth Godon post – it’s short – here it is:

We spend way too much time teaching people technique. Teaching people to be good at flute, or C++ or soccer. 

It’s a waste because the fact is, most people can learn to be good at something, if they only choose to be, if they choose to make the leap and put in the effort and deal with the failure and the frustration and the grind.

But most people don’t want to commit until after they’ve discovered that they can be good at something. So they say, “teach me, while I stand here on one foot, teach me while I gossip with my friends via text, teach me while I wander off to other things. And, sure, if the teaching sticks, then I’ll commit.”

We’d be a lot more successful if organized schooling was all about creating an atmosphere where we can sell commitment (and where people will buy it). A committed student with access to resources is almost unstoppable.

Great teachers teach commitment.

This idea of “teaching commitment” keeps sifting up to the top of my mind since I read this.  What does it actually mean to teach commitment? And is it related to this idea of “accountability” that I said last week I’d explore today?  Honestly, I still have no compelling way to talk about accountability.  And, if I’m not feeling it, I’m not going there!

Last night I saw a cartoon and link to a post on Facebook about how little freedom and autonomy today’s kids have. It was worth a quick read and seemed related.  But, as much as I absolutely resonate with this idea of “free range kids,” having not faced the challenges and pressures of making these parental decisions myself, I’m staying away from publicly offering any opinion on the subject!

This brings me back to this whole idea of commitment.  I’ve written to you consistently because I made a commitment to do so. In a session with my coach Lissa Boles last September, she challenged me to start writing and posting – regularly.  Something in me knew that doing this would be good for me.   So, with my fear in tow, on October 1^st I wrote about our very old oak tree and its brush with being cut down.

As an art teacher, I am called upon to teach technique – how watercolor works – how to handle the paint, water and paper to get the desired effect.  It’s probably the most obvious and expected reason to seek out a painting teacher.  But reading what Seth Godon wrote has me want to be a great teacher – I want to teach commitment. And I’m not sure I know how.

This morning, poking around looking for what to write about, I found some stream-of-consciousness “freewriting” I did last August.  Here’s an excerpt:

It’s what we want. To be able to make beautiful work, or compelling work, that excites us and lights us up.  It may start as an escape, a break from the other parts of life, especially when these other parts are challenging.  Painting saved my life. Took me from my grief of not being a mother and has given my life focus and commitment and satisfaction. It’s amazing how different I am, how much of myself I have access to and freedom with. How much space I take up, how much more alive I am. 

This is all possible for everyone who wants to.  Desire is huge, it’s the fuel.  It doesn’t have to be big, fiery and visible. It just has to be enough. “I want…”, “I would love to…”, “if only I could…”  Just a small, timid peep is enough. It comes from somewhere deep in each of us.  And what’s needed is an environment where it can be brought out.  I know watercolor. I can teach the skills, I’m good at it.  I’m good at showing how it works. But ultimately the skill has to come in the doing of it.

Desire is the starting place, it’s the seed. But the “doing of it” – painting regularly, the painting-that-changes-our-lives – takes this commitment. Seth used the word “atmosphere” I used the word “environment”.  Environment is key.  There are so many stories I hear of teachers who have damaged the art-maker in people.  I’ve lived a few of these stories too.  These are environments that have us turning away from any commitment.   So what environment fosters that commitment,  what “sells” it?

Sometime in the last year I heard this come out of my mouth:  “I’m made to be a teacher.  It’s my experience that the particular way I’m designed, where I am the most “me,” is in accompanying others in their creative unfolding.  I’m a good watercolorist, and there are lots of  watercolorists who make beautiful and skilled work.  I keep painting because – well, there are paintings in me, *and* because, in order to stay vital and alive as a teacher, I must stay in my own process. I must ride my own edge.”

Though my painting has its ebbs and flows, the work that comes through me is evolving and I’m all in, I’m committed to it.  Does this matter those who come paint with me? I wonder how this impacts the teaching environment I create.  I so wonder.  Relatedly, I’ve recently come to the realization that I am most alive as a teacher when teaching those who are truely committed.  It’s just not the same if painting is a pleasant past-time.  Committment feeds off of committment.

I don’t have a tidy ribbon to tie at the end of this post today.  The questions I’ve asked here are quite alive in me.  If you have thoughts about creative environment and your commitment to painting – or to anything really, I’d love to hear them. Please share.

Love,

Cara

March 24, 2015 – Creativity and Tension

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The first time I ever painted was in June of 1992.  My mom and I took a Saturday class – painting flowers in watercolor.  I painted a somewhat awkward blue iris – and I fell in love – with the playing with the colors and the texture of watercolor paper.  I’d been bitten by the bug!  Over the next few months, on my own, I painted several small paintings of flowers without backgrounds. Two of them are above.  I observed, drew and painted from live flowers sitting in front of me.  And then I hardly painted at all for seven or eight years.  A lot happened in my life in those years:  divorce, job change, living in Paris, buying a house of my own back home in Marin,  meeting my Joseph, his cancer, moving again, getting married.  In 2000, when I found myself working for a company a 2-hour drive away, I arranged it so I could work from home three days a week. This gave me some extra time and I picked up painting again.  I began working from photographs and painted my first “fuzzy background.”  But I would still not paint for sometimes months and months.  I started a piece and then hit a phase in it when I just hated what was happening, felt stuck and I’d put it away and not pick it up again for a long time.

In the spring of 2005, I did a seven-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock in Woodacre, right near where I grew up.  The format of the retreat was such that, after a day to fully arrive inside ourselves and the retreat space, we had five hours a day to spend, on our own, with our creative practice.  Five hours with myself and my watercolors – no one telling me what to do and no one to talk to, to distract myself.  Heaven!  I brought all my supplies and my unfinished work – one of our dog, Bud and another more loosely painted, of a vignette from Quarante, a village I’d visited with my mom and dad in France ten years earlier.  One sunny day, I sat outside in my straw hat, with a 12”x16” block of watercolor paper and painted, one quick painting after the other, with a 1” flat brush entirely with my left (non-dominant) hand, letting whatever I wanted to paint come out, without a lot of thought.  After that, back in the studio, the idea arrived to cut two of the paintings in strips and weave them together – one in soft greens of the surrounding hills and the other of a rough cross-section of a volcano erupting – all in reds, oranges and browns.  The next thought came to combine two others – a heart and a fetus in utero – into a piece that was moving and healing.  I wove the unrealized hope of being a mother into my emotional center for safe keeping.

There was a large piece of cardboard – like from a refrigerator box or something – leaning up on the wall of the studio. Someone had carefully drawn what looked like a crack in a big hunk of stone vertically down the middle of the cardboard and then scrawled across it “Don’t be afraid to murder your little darlings.”    I was taken aback by the affront in this, and it gave me permission to dive in and just ruin the painting of Bud the Dog – which is just what I needed to get over my paralysis and actually finish it.  I did the same with the painting of the French village which we know now as “Blue Door.”

I look back on that retreat as a really fruitful time for my creative process.  And – yet, I still wasn’t painting much apart from it.  It wasn’t until my friend Eleanor, a beautiful landscape artist, gathered a small group of us to participate in Marin Open Studios at our church.  When she asked, I took a deep breath, “that means I have to sell my work, right?”   She kindly told me, yes that is the idea!  Shortly after that, I realized that selling my work, letting my paintings go, was the sure way to have more come through me. There is a flow that I could step into that would enable the ideas and the energy for many more paintings to come through.  What I could not have predicted is what having an audience, and even collectors would do to my capacity to stick with my work and paint more paintings!   A desire to have at least one new painting for each show created a structure for the work in me to emerge through.  My process is not very fast and I can’t paint for hours and hours at a stretch, so I am not as prolific as some artists.  But since 2007, I’ve painted 8-10 paintings a year – a whole lot more than the two or three in the previous five years!

Leading watercolor groups has also provided fuel for my creative evolution.  I’m both exposed to what other artists are creating and need to stay on my creative edge so that I am in integrity with them as they navigate theirs.  The idea to paint my latest painting with just three colors/pigments came from Shannon in our Thursday group. She’s studied with Jeannie Vodden who uses just three colors in her work.  Out of this experience, I see the color in color more than ever and have grown even more solid in knowing how to mix colors, given that I only have three to work from.  I’ve also learned the limitations of these three and why I’m not giving up the other paints/pigments I use!

The phrase “creative tension” has been rattling around in my head for the past week after having been given an exercise by my coach to answer four questions about myself and my work in 15 or fewer words.  Restriction is good for creativity.  Whether it’s the restriction of sequestering myself from the distractions of my life in a retreat, or the restriction of time because of an upcoming show, or even limiting myself to just three colors.  The old adage “necessity is the mother of invention” relates to creative tension, but there’s something more.   It seems to me that creativity needs, or what my creativity needs, is both the structure and the space.  Taken further, it occurs to me the structure provides the space for creativity to come through. The masculine provides for the feminine.

I took my walk with Bo, before writing today and this bounced around in me.  What came to me in the end – in the ultimate, is that spiritual existence is unbounded and we live physical, time-bound, space-bound lives.   What if this manifest world, with all its restrictions, even its pain and suffering are part of the design, absolutely necessary for the expression of spirit, and that this is what is evolving our consciousness?  I’m not sure if this idea is even fully baked in me, but it’s where I’m being led today.  And it’s coming through because of the structure of writing to you every week.

Last week’s post about the value of work spawned quite a discussion among some of you.  I heard Alison (Armstrong) say something this week that seems related, which is withholding accountability is emasculating.  This has me curious, sitting with the question “why do we withhold accountability?”  I’ll let this simmer another week before sitting to write about it – stay tuned. Until then, have a lovely week.

Love,

Cara

March 10, 2015 – Where do ideas come from?

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Right now I’m working on a new, big (it’s 40”x40”) painting that is very different from anything else I’ve ever painted.  It’s a collage based on an image of me standing in front of one of the clocks inside the Museé d’Orsay in Paris, the beautiful museum in the old train station building which houses the French national collection of Impressionist art.  The original photo was nearly black and white – I took out the white and layered it over the image I used to paint “Paris Roses.”

Both of the photos were taken on the same trip to Paris in late spring of 1998.  I went with Karen, a friend of my brother Matt’s.  We were single ladies who wanted to go to Europe and didn’t have anyone to go with.  Matt connected us – we had dinner and went to a movie in Mill Valley and decided it would work to travel for two weeks together! I speak French and Karen speaks Castillian Spanish. We went to Paris, St. Remy in Provence and Barcelona.  It was one of the best two weeks of my life.

And our last day in Paris was one of the most memorable days. Karen is a tennis player and fan of the sport.  Roland Garros (the French Open) was just starting. We went out to see if we could get tickets and ended up with center court seats to see Martina Hingis and Pete Sampras play matches our last day in Paris. It was fun for me to experience the big-time tennis world and it was a thrill for Karen to watch these greats play.  Afterwards, we returned to Paris and ended up in a place called something like “Le Bar American” on rue Keller in the 11^th.  Frank Sinatra had recently died and they were playing his music all evening. Karen is trained opera singer with a beautiful voice and grew up in New Jersey singing all the old standards.  She sang along as we drank pretty colored drinks in lovely stemmed glasses.  I think we had charmed the bartenders – they didn’t want us to leave, so they went to the brasserie across the street to get menus and then shuttled our food over to us!

We left there – pretty looped – and made our way to the Gare de Lyon to take the night train to the south.  We shared our 4-couchette  compartment with just one other person – a sweet, young French guy. As we got underway, Karen decided to treat us by singing “O mio bambino caro” a very popular Puccini aria – it’s one I’m a sucker for!  She sang at full volume – I was transfixed with that I-can’t-believe this-is-actually-happening-to-me-feeling – a private opera, on a train leaving Paris.  The magic of this memory will live in me forever. Every time I recall the story, I feel it all over again.

I think the enchantment of this trip and that day is in this painting I’m now working on.  It’s remarkable for me to think that the silhouette in this photo Karen took of this clock is actually me.  She seems so elegant and feminine – timeless even.  I love how you can see my fingers hanging down from the railing.

As I’ve shown the resulting image and the painting on its way, I’ve been asked several times:  “where did you get this idea?”  I answer, I don’t know, it just came to me.  So, where do we get ideas?  We get inspiration, notions, nigglings, aha’s – but from where? Being the good search geek that I am, I went online last night and put the question “where do ideas come from?” into Google. What came out was a “playlist” of TED talks centered on just that question. Then I listened to them as I worked on the painting.  I heard some interesting thoughts on ideas and creativity.  These are the three talks I found the most compelling:

Steven Johnson talked about how the first coffee house in Oxford, England was the beginning of the Enlightenment – as before that people drank alcohol all day and were too drunk to think! He says it’s the free sharing of thoughts among groups of people that spawns great ideas. His talk also has a fun story about how the world got GPS technology.

Elizabeth Gilbert shared how she’s faced with the fact that her greatest work may very well be behind her in having written a mega-bestseller “Eat Pray Love” and how in ancient times creativity was attributed to daemons and muses, freeing us from the responsibility (and credit) for our success or failure – it’s not up to each of us – yay!

Matt Ridley’s really upbeat talk is about how diversification and specialization is an integral part of human evolution and how ideas come along because we communicate and cooperate and each do what we are best at.  If we aren’t consumed with doing everything necessary to survive, we can live easier and better lives. Love this!

What I heard had me see that the idea for this painting came about as a progression:

• It started with doing an exercise in color mixing many years ago. I saw how the relative lightness of the yellow squares created a pattern which gave me the idea that I might want to do something intentional with that at some point.
• Then two years ago when a couple of the painters in my group did this same color exercise, I saw how much fun they were having and remembered this idea. I decided to paint an image – our neighbors’ crab apple tree – one square at a time. Interesting! And a great way to experience that everything is abstract – we paint what we see, shape by shape.
• After this, I went looking for a filter that was more interesting than a grid of squares. I love maps and I love Paris, so why not paint this Parisian flower stall through the map of Paris?
• Which then had me searching through photos for others of Paris that I might paint. I landed on the picture of me and the clock. Pulled out of a scrap book, it was propped up on my desk for more than a year before the idea came to put Paris Roses behind it.
• And I have the beginnings of the next painting – one of me taken at the end of my Paris half-year, painted through the “filter” of the rose window in Saint Chappelle in Paris. I’m a bit shy about it – it seems somewhat self-absorbed. But I’m hardly the first artist to paint herself!

I know that being alive at this point in history and the support of my husband, my mom and millions of others doing what they do frees me to be creative – and that this idea came as a progression and as a product of interaction with the world and with other artists, and being in a safe environment.  But, I also subscribe to what Elizabeth Gilbert shared – which Stephen Pressfield also writes about towards the end of his kick-ass book “The War of Art” – there are unseen forces from the etheric world that feed us creative ideas.

Where we come in is twofold:  we must be available for these ideas to reach us – even intentionally put ourselves in the situations where we best receive them – which for me is often on my morning walks with Bo.  And then we must do something with them – which most likely will mean honing the craft, the skills to be able to use them.  Plus, if we are the channels, the vessels to make manifest these ideas, it takes us actually doing something! There we go, the masculine and the feminine – married again.

And it takes believing that each of us is a creative being, if your heart beats and you are breathing, you have the potential for ideas to come through you.

With my love,

Cara

February 17, 2015 – Make art, change your life

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In November 2009, my mom and I flew to New York to see an exhibition of Joseph Raffael’s paintings at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Chelsea.  Joseph and his family used to live in the San Geronimo Valley where I grew up and where my mom and dad still live.  When we were all kids, my older brother, Joe was friends with his son Matthew. They used to ride bikes and go fishing in the creeks together.

Joseph had a studio separate from their house up in the trees in San Geronimo.  I remember being inside it, feeling awed and dwarfed by one of his huge oil paintings of rounded rocks from the bottom of a stream bed that was up on the wall.  His later watercolors of flowers were, more than anything else, what has inspired me to learn to paint.

The Nancy Hoffman Gallery is in a modern, metal, concrete and glass building.  As we walked up to it, I caught a sliver of the view inside, the bright color of a painting peeking through. The bright yellow of the dahlia made my heart jump!  Walking in and being surrounded by this artwork was incredible.  These paintings are enormous – something like 5 feet by 7 feet – and jammed with color and aliveness.  The energy in them is astonishing to experience in person.    After about 45 minutes with them, though, I had an almost sick feeling come over me. I had to leave.  It was so odd.  What I make of this is that I must have known that there is some version of these large paintings in me, my huge paintings, the thought of which completely freaked me out.

When I first was learning, I painted on a quarter sheet of watercolor paper (11”x15”).  It’s a good size to start with.  But more than fearing I’d be possibly “wasting” a large piece of paper (I’m ever the thrifty one), I’m sure I was unconsciously afraid of making a larger impact. What’s remarkable is that alongside that fear is – and has been – something in me that is called to do just that. I have this strong desire to make beautiful paintings – some of them very big.

In 2008 I went to see the glass artist, Dale Chihuly’s exhibition at the De Young in San Francisco. The exhibit included a video about his work.  The video showed a whole team of people in silver heat suits handling human-sized pieces of molten glass.  I was struck by the incredible resources that it takes for his work to become manifest – work from just one human being’s vision.  I had the thought that if he can allow himself to be a channel for such inspiration, such that it’s not possible for him to do the work alone, then this level of creative passion, of creative need, is potentially in any of us – including me!  I remember having this insight in me when I experienced Joseph Raffael’s work in New York.

A few months after the trip to New York, I was in Perry’s Art Supplies in San Anselmo and saw heavy (the equivalent of 300lb) sheets of Arches watercolor paper that were 60” by 40.”  I had no idea sheet paper even came that big! I thought in order to paint really large, one had to use the thinner roll paper, as Joseph Raffael does.  My heart literally started pounding!  I bought all 5 sheets they had in stock.

It took until the year after that for my biggest painting (to-date!) to come through – Hallelujah.  Here I am standing next to it, so you can get an idea of its scale.

These experiences are part of my unfolding, not just in my creative life, but as a being alive on this planet. Learning the skills of working with our materials – learning our craft – is an integral part of what we do. Painting watercolor is our particular means to an end beyond the artwork that it allows us to make.  That which  resides in our hearts, that which we respond to in the world and the messages we receive as we witness creativity in others helps us discover our voice.

There is no one else who is ever going to make the art that is in each of us – not the way we paint when we first start out, not when we’ve been painting for many years.  Every time we put our brush into a pool of paint and touch it to our paper, it is us.  It carries our mark, like the tone of our voice and the way we sign our name. Learning to paint gives us a way to show the world who we are.  And the more we do it, the more refined our expression becomes, the more vivid is the illumination of our essence onto watercolor paper.  The consciousness and the spirit of each of us lives in the work we make.

(And for the record, watercolor is just one of the uncountable forms this can take. It’s just the one that has chosen me, so it’s the only one I can speak to!)

Since I’ve begun to paint and I have heeded the call to evolve as a painter, a teacher/guide and as a person – I see and hold myself altogether differently. I experience a level of freedom that I couldn’t imagine was possible for me.  I am more myself than ever.  I have grown through my paintings.  The desire in me to paint carries a wisdom for my life.  Early on it led me out of the grief and disappointment at not having children. Now it is the “why” of my life.

There is an instrument in the center of my chest that registers inspiring beauty – it’s a particular kind of energy.  And that energy must be translated into paintings representing how I see it and feel it.  It’s what I’m here for.  It’s why I’m alive.  And it’s made me who I am today.

I believe it is the same for all of us.  While we are painting, learning, exploring, operating in the face of our own fears and resistance, we are being transformed. There’s nothing we need to say or do for this to be, it just happens!  Eventually the desire in us to make art that astonishes us, fuels us to do just that. We are changed by revealing ourselves in this way.  And by doing this, we bless others with this view into us.

I invite you to join in.

Love,

Cara