23 the Cosmos Within
I have seen videos of artists at work, with time condensed to show the process of creating a painting from beginning to end. However you can’t see what is going on inside of them as they paint, so I thought today I would try to give you a snapshot of of the inner dialogue I have as I am painting with Hilma:
Where to begin?
Hilma: When in doubt, make the spiral.
I make a big spiral that take fills the entire page. I started in the center of the page, but spiral leans towards the left, and goes out of the frame. I think I have a tendency to lean to the left in my drawings. Does that mean something?
Hilma: You don’t have to know what the shapes mean, or what the picture is about. Just put down lines and see what emerges.
I trace my left hand.
So far there’s a spiral with a hand hovering above it. I add planets inside the hand and outside, raindrops, which might also be tears, which get smaller as they’re falling down into this vortex.
Perhaps the vortex is being watered?
Above I make roots, which changes the perspective. Now the vortex is below, as if a view into the earth. It’ s like looking into the heart of Gaia.
I think about how roots reach downward, and also connect to other roots. This is what give a plant or a tree the ability to withstand the elements above ground. The strength of a plant or a tree depends on how deep and how wide its roots grow.
I have heard it said that trees are our ancestors. Which means, we are more like trees than we know.
What would it mean for me, for human beings to reach downward and extend our roots?
The form that roots take is varied and messy. They connect to each other in clumps, not clean geometric shapes and form themselves into organic tangles.
There’s a richness in things that are tangled up, that weave in and out of each other in ways that cannot be easily separated.
My thinking is often tangled, lots of overlapping ideas that take me a lot of time to unravel.
Tangles come with some confusion: There is not one clear way to undo a tangle. The only way to unravel a tangle is to start somewhere, to pry something loose. Anywhere you start is as good as anyplace else.
To undo a tangle requires patience, something I am not known for. You have to work at it bit by bit.
I look at this hand hovering over an abyss. We think of the abyss as the unknown, a void, empty space. I have often been afraid of the unknown, the empty spaces within me. But I am reminded of what Adrienne Rich said about the void, in her essay “Women and Honor: Some notes on lying,” published in Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978.
We begin out of the void, out of darkness and emptiness. it is part of the cycle understood by the old pagan religions, that materialism denies. Out of death, rebirth; out of nothing, something.
The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our ’emptiness’ with children.
We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core.
Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of our truth…
Adrienne Rich on the Alchemy of Human Possibility and What "Truth" Really MeansLong before Sam Harris's memorable assertion that lying is "both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be…www.themarginalian.org
The void, the unknown, as Rich reminds me, is not an empty place or a place to be feared. It is a rich, and full, a place of discovery and self knowledge. It is the heart of creativity.