6 Degrees of Progress

For the past several days, I've been working on a plan for my upcoming workshop: Still Point in a Changing World. My original idea for the workshop was to offer participants an opportunity to spend time in their studios, (whatever their definition of studio might be) on a daily basis for the period of 21 days.

A common notion states that a habit requires 21 days to set. (In actuality, some habits can take longer, but I thought that this time period would be  workable range in people's lives.)

I wanted the studio practice to be akin to a meditation practice; something that they could return to day after day from whatever flurry they found themselves in and locate a point of stillness.

It was inspired too, by my own practice of  watercolor, which I'd conceived in a time of hospital fatigue.

I'd wanted to do something simple, daily and beautiful, with which I could find refreshment, nourishment and tranquility. I found it in the watercolors..

However, I realized that I couldn't just say to workshop participants : "Ok, get yourself a box of watercolors, find something to paint and just keep it up for the next 21 days." Instead, I decided to read about mindfulness and creativity and found myself covered in reference books.

At the same time, the Jewish practice of the Counting the Omer began. (This ancient practice takes place between the holiday of Passover and the later harvest festival of Shavuot).

An artist friend of mine, Laura Hegfield, introduced me to a Facebook page entitled, "A Way In," where Counting the Omer has been re-imagined as an invitation to mindfulness practice: paying attention not only to each day as it passes but also to the individual spiritual qualities which were assigned to it by the 16^th century Jewish mystics.

I became fascinated with the simple words and phrases which were offered up each day like a carefully crafted ceramic bowl.

I decided to weave some of the meditations (along with others from a variety of sources) together with prompts for each of the 21 days. Each day of the 21 day workshop will offer a meditation and studio practice for artists to explore.

I couldn't wait, so I decided to start experimenting myself.  I'm working on Day 10 and you can see the results above. If you're intrigued, you can register here for my workshop and discover what the rest of the days, and the other five workshops, have to offer.

The Limits of Choice

Art making continually satisfies something deep inside us and, at the same time, places us beyond ourselves. Cathy Malchiodi, The Soul's Palette

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.

W.H. Auden

For the last couple of weeks, I've been on a strict 1 color diet. Yes. You read that right; not a 1 calorie diet but a 1 color one.

Color is something I use lavishly in my work, a substance that I immerse myself in and then splash around like a duck.

It's also something in which I easily get lost.

While dipping my brush in color, thinking about the confluence of hues, tints and shades, I lose track of how much paint is loaded on my brush and what color is flowing where.

This came to a head one Friday morning during a watercolor class. Stacey, my instructor, put her hand firmly on the table and said, "O.K., I want you to use just one color for the time being. It doesn't matter what color it is, but you can't mix two together and you can't even mix black." (yes, that indescribably subtle blend of cobalt blue and raw umber...)

OI!, it was already Passover; a week of the matzoh mile and now this: I'm  supposed to restrict myself to one color?

It's been two weeks now and I'm getting used to this diet. Heck, at times, I even like it.

At the very least, it keeps things simple. While writing this post, my eyes lighted on a short interview with researcher, Sheena Iyengar, who wrote The Art of Choosing.  "When did you first have an inkling that choice has limits?" asked the interviewer. Sheena  answered that it happened while studying the effect that choice had on a group of 3-year-olds.

"Half the children were permitted to play with any of the toys in the room, while the other half were told what they could play with. I assumed that the kids with the most freedom to choose would have more fun, right? Wrong. I observed the exact opposite. The assigned group played happily; the free choice group was disengaged and listless."

How about that? Adapting to one color has made me anything but disengaged and listless. And there are other payoffs. The first time I get the leaf-to-bud balance just right, the flower in front of me comes alive on the paper.

Despite my kvetching, I'm proud that I am keeping my commitment to a 'year of watercolor'  and grateful for Stacey's steady hand as a teacher and artist.  I may just stay on this new diet for a while...

States of Mind

Last  week I pulled my car into a parking space at the gym. I stayed in the car a few minutes longer to listen to a report on the late journalist, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame, who had died a few days before.

I was struck by his comment made in response to another journalist asking Mike about old age. He had replied that, of course, "it's all down hill from (t)here."  I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the original quote, but those words resounded in my mind over the next several days.

I challenged them-- "that isn't true!"--but I realized something had changed in the person who set off to Europe at 17 by herself and the young woman who created human size nests in her apartment in her twenties.

I tried to figure out what was different, particularly artistically. As a younger person, one confronts a series of firsts. Each new experience can be a source of peak emotion--residue passion that can be channeled zestfully into a new piece of work.

As Twyla Tharp notes in her excellent book,  The Creative Habit, "As we age, it's hard to recapture the recklessness of youth, when new ideas flew off us like light from a pinwheel sparkler. But we more than compensate for this with the ideas we do generate, and with our hard -earned wisdom about how to capture and, more importantly, connect those ideas."

In my fifties, I don't run into many firsts anymore, but there sure are a lot of second chances. And revisions.

I look out my studio window and I'm struck by the the beauty of tree branches with their tightly clustered knots of of budding leaves and their shadows cast  upon the wall of the house. At twenty, I doubt that I would have gotten so much pleasure from such a simple sight, at least not for long. Tharp continues:

"If you find, in your own work, that ideas you didn't have room for at a particular time nonetheless lingered and arose later, you are coming close to an idea creative state, one where creativity becomes a self-perpetuating habit. You are linking your art. Everything in your life feeds into your work, and the work feeds into more work."

This is the beauty of  hanging in there for the long run...I'm nearly two months to the day into my year of watercolor and I'm still painting.  I'm stalking my studio with more ideas than I have time to chase. Irises are blossoming in the garden and outside my studio door, the creeping Hydrangea has reached the second floor after a 16 year climb; a green enclosure for me to contemplate when I step outside. A glorious first after all.

Going Through, Not Passing Over

I've been thinking a lot about holidays this year, particularly the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Passover is a time of spiritual renewal, of looking back in order to see ahead. A broad theme of Passover is freedom, something so vast, that I've scarcely tried to contemplate it; being someone who prefers to find the macro in the close-by mundane.

I'm also someone who seeks to understand what spiritual traditions have in common rather than how they differ.

The Friday before the holiday weekend, I met a child in the hospital where I work whose artwork contained just these confluences of large and small, distant and nearby, to which I would add, past and present. This young six year old girl had lost her father to incarceration and her mother to death by addiction.

When I first heard about her, I wasn't sure what to expect. Certainly not the vibrant being who walked into the playroom eager to engage in the activity I had chosen: creating a paper Easter basket.

I like this activity because by creating a series of folds and cuts in a square piece of paper and manipulating them, you can create a real container.

Flora sat down and pulled one of the folded pieces over to her place and began to copy the words, "Happy Easter," onto one of the squares. With great detail and many felt tip markers, she painstakingly created designs and drawings on each surface of what would become the inside and the outside of the basket.

I find it intriguing that at this stage, while the child is painting or drawing, the inside and outside are not yet determined. Enclosure can go either way, depending what she chooses to do. A metaphorical exercise about the public and private selves.

At any rate, after Flora had filled both sides of the paper, I stapled her basket together-but she wasn't done quite yet. she took squares of soft, pastel patterned fleece and glued one to each surface of what had turned into the inside of the box.

She proudly showed me her basket, asking, "but where are the eggs?" I went on my own egg hunt and found several colored plastic eggs. I handed them to her and she tucked them into the bottom of her basket.

It seemed to me that this small child exquisitely exemplifies the theme of Passover. She lost her original home and was forced to leave for a new one (she is lovingly cared for by a relative); she had created her own safe transitional home in the basket.

Adaptation

Last weekend, I drove south to Mt. Madonna, a retreat center located on top of a mountain populated by redwoods and wildflowers. I'd come to take down my exhibit, "Pieced Reflections," and to help my friend, Stacey Vetter, install hers.

When I hung my art, I knew that Jon Kabat-Zinn, the great teacher of mindfulness meditation, would be teaching a workshop beginning that evening. I enjoyed imagining him walking by my work and taking it in. A special bonus was selling work to two of his students from Texas and Colorado.

A variety of teachers come to Mt. Madonna from all over the country. A workshop scheduled while Stacey's exhibit is up is, "The Second Half of Life," led by Angeles Arrien, cultural anthropologist and author of the Four Fold Way. Intrigued by the title I picked up a postcard about it and read these words:

"In every culture, in every age, there is a turning point in life. At this threshold begins the greatest adventure; the second half of life. When you find courage to change at midlife, a miracle happens and you are opened, softened, strengthened, and deepened; prepared to create your legacy-an imprint of your dream for our world that can only come true in the second half of life."

I was inspired by the words: "create your legacy-your dream for the world." In this youth obsessed culture, it is positively counter-cultural to believe that our greatest adventure still lays ahead.

I've set off on my first adventure with the 'year of watercolor' project. My challenge to create a watercolor each day for a year has become a practice similar to meditation; a time when bits of undigested feelings and thought rise to the surface.

I've stared down the demons of comparison, attachment and judgment with what I hope is a corresponding firm but loving kindness.

Painting every day allows me to see how thoroughly events of the previous day influence the way I take hold of the brush, the amount of paint on the bristles, the control, or lack there of, with which color streams onto paper. I've determined that I will return to paint each day, even if the watercolor from the day before looks like a smeary mess. I don't need to share them, but they remind me that a lotus can only grow out of the mud.