March 24, 2015 – Creativity and Tension

Listen to this post:

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