April 28, 2015 – A home for the unwanted

Listen to this post:

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