Two years into the program, and finally one day...

At some point within the past two years the lightbulb went on about how artmaking is both an inner and an outer process: by working with materials, shape, color, form, words, movement, etc. on the outside we are also effecting transformation (thoughts, energy, ideas, symbolic representation, relationship to form, metaphorical associations, beliefs) on the inside. In making art I am remaking myself in some way.

What I hadn't really understood until two weeks ago is the piece about letting the materials guide the artmaking process. Wow. It's a very interesting moment when you finally start seeing what you haven't been seeing.

At the end of our Become Yourself housewarming party, a small group of us rounded out the night down in the studio making collages. I'm a fan of collage -- especially those that tap into a layer of visceral "knowing" (the best phrase I can come up with to describe our deep capacity to feel the relationships between symbols even if we can't describe them in language). I haven't done much collage, tho, most likely because up until this portal evening I've always approached them on a literal level: I want to make this, so I need pictures of this and this and this... But lo, on that night, after the singing, the champagne, the candlelight, the brilliance of spontaneous performances that gave birth to Inside the Artists Studio on our wee stage, something else was in motion so I just let the images do their thing. A beautiful b&w photo of a man playing a violin wanted to be carefully cut out, so I started there. Then there was the piece of blue paper with the little white dots that looked like stars that I had found on the street in Minneapolis - it wanted to be part of the picture too. And the photo of the dresses hanging on the line from Marin magazine. And the castle. I just set to cutting them out and waited and witnessed their self organization process. The violin man became the man in the sky playing music to move the world, creating just enough order so that the castle could have a manicured garden, and allowing sufficient freedom so that the dresses on the clothesline could blow in the wind and the flowers grow across the page.


A few days later there was another collage.


And then a few days after that I experienced my first consciously transformative dance rehearsal (let the movement make the dance).

To be continued...