Category: Visual Art

Communicating…

by susanbradfordart, posted in Creative Process, Healing, Learning, Visual Art

I’ve been thinking a lot about communication. How precious and precarious it is. How difficult it is to get it right. And how much I have to learn about it. As much as I try, and as much progress I think I’ve made, it can all get weird in just a moment’s time. This has all been working on me and within me, stewing around inside my brain and my heart for the past few days. And I just got a small piece of the puzzle late last night.

I couldn’t sleep because we had an intense thunderstorm with lightening coming in like strobe lights, followed by huge explosions of sound. Very exciting. Very unusual for this small corner of the world. We get rain but not thunderstorms.  Another facet of climate change?  Sigh. But I digress…

So in the midst of the storm, it came to me that at the core of so much of my communicating is the need to be right.  I like to think that it is about the need to be witnessed, to be heard.  But when I am very honest with myself (as I try to be), I realize that after all this time and all this self-work, I still just want to be right.  And I want everyone around me to think so too.  The more I want it, the more tongue-tied and inarticulate I get.  The more off-message, the more counter productive.  The more someone disagrees with me, or if I have a minority opinion in a group, the more I dig my heels in.  I get a little preachy.  I keep trying different ways to make them see my point.  I advance the art of communication not at all.  Sigh.  I need to go back to the drawing board.  To breathe.  To allow.  To surrender.  All good words for me.   I have so very much work to do.  This looking at self stuff is so not easy!

I did this drawing as a commission for someone.  It represents the Fifth Chakra or the Throat Chakra, home of communication with ourselves and others.  It is light at the center, but it gets a bit dark and messy at the edge, with many different layers and a lot going on. The words I thought of for her were easy and discerning.  More sighs!  More good words for me.

I’m feeling a bit confused…

by susanbradfordart, posted in Creative Process, Healing, Learning, Mandala Art, Visual Art

I’ve been reading the June/July issue of Art in America (my only contact with the art world when I am at home on Orcas), and it has provoked me, shaken me up a bit, and confused me about the art I choose to make.  The theme of the issue is “Resistance” and it not about my style of resisting, meaning something that I don’t want to do or to look at in my own life.  No, it centers on artists who are making strong socio-political statements with their art.  Many of the artists live in countries with repressive governments and are making these sometimes very public statements at great personal risk.  They are truly heroes, making difficult yet relevant art.

There have always been artists doing this kind of strong, issue-oriented work, and it never bothered me.  My art has always been so personal to me, arising from my own inner need to create and exorcise my own demons.  I study contemporary art and am passionate about knowing what is current, but have known and felt comfortable with the idea that my own work was not so cutting edge.  Challenging in its own way.  But not political.  More spiritual than anything else in a kind of abstract, contemporary way.  Not necessarily classically beautiful, but not unpleasant to look at either.

And I have kept at it for well over forty years which is an achievement in itself.  But these are strange and significant times we are living through, and reading about some of this work is stirring something deep within me.  Making me feel obsolete and a little guilty, causing me to feel that there is something else I could be doing other than signing endless petitions over the internet and donating a little money to several different environmental and human rights causes over the year.

But what would it be?  It’s not that I want to be famous!   I need to remember that my form of activism is done on a different scale.  As a healer and a Reiki teacher, I can influence one person at a time, helping them to realize their own potential to become calmer and maybe a bit happier.  My paintings can introduce people to other worlds, to my inner life, and perhaps to give them a glimpse into their own.  My mandala art, with its one-word titles, is designed for meditation and contemplation because that’s what I need as I am making them.  The one pictured below is titled Hope.

So I’ll keep reading and learning.  My challenge is to care about humanity and the future of the world in my own way.  To keep caring and to keep making the art I love to make because it’s how I keep myself sane and healthy.  I do know that somehow it makes a difference, even if it’s only to create me as a better person.

Looking

by susanbradfordart, posted in Creative Process, Mandala Art, Visual Art

I spend a large part of my day looking.

In the morning, I look at the screen on my computer.

In the afternoon, I spend time outside. I look at the minute details of my garden, checking each flower and each vegetable for signs of growth, or slug damage, or readiness to be picked, pruned or harvested. I look at the whole vegetable garden (I regret that I got such a late start this year, and I trust that there will be more to eat very soon).  I look at each flower bed, and try to manage the weeds that all this rain is bringing. I look at the sky and the water and the mountains in the distance. I see the sun gleaming or the clouds moving or the rain glistening. I notice the other houses near where I live. I take in the trees swaying in the breeze.  I love it all.  I breathe.

Then it’s time to go into the studio.  I take the time to look at what I’ve been working on before going on to the next step, the next stroke the next layer.  Then I paint and I look while I’m painting.  And I look again, and paint again.

But all the looking is a prelude for feeling.  If I am painting an abstract composition, I need to explore what is moving me in the moment, knowing that painting it will change the feeling or the emotion into something else.  If I am creating a mandala, I take the word that I am associating with it and feel deeply into what it means for me.  If I am prompted to paint my version of a landscape, I am not representing anything actual.  I am feeling into everything I have seen, everything I have been looking at, and making a semblance of the real world as it has been filtered through my mind and heart.

The three small paintings on paper which are pictured above are those kind of landscapes.

little jewels

by susanbradfordart, posted in Creative Process, Learning, Mandala Art, Visual Art

Each of these small wooden circles measures only one and a half inches in diameter.  Yet in each one, there is a lot going on.  Some definitely are more simple than others.  They just came together with ease, and felt finished.  Others are more worked, and that is because they didn’t flow as well initially.  A color may have been wrong.  Or my hand slipped as I applied the enamel paint, so that a cover up became essential.  Some of those become my favorites because they have more history.  Enamel paint is fun to work with because it dries very quickly and is opaque, making layering possible.

Each one has a magnet attached to the back, so they are useful items to have.

 

 

I love making them for several reasons.  It is fun to work with a water-based paint instead of oil.  It is really fun and challenging to work that small.  It takes concentration to do them.  I need to keep breathing as I work or something inevitably goes wrong.  I get a lot of information from doing so many of them at once.  It is liberating to think of them as functional.  Getting an energetic brushstroke with a tiny little brush is not easy for me.  And doing them gives me a lot of information for doing my other paintings.  Frees the hand, informs the eye, engages the brain.

 

Spring Mandala (Tolerance)

by susanbradfordart, posted in Creative Process, Healing, Mandala Art, Visual Art

In January, I came up with the idea of doing a new mandala for each season of the year. I finished the one for Winter on the day before the Spring Equinox. This one is ready well in advance of summer.  Good for me!

The sub-theme for Spring is Tolerance.  And here is why.  Do all the flowers get stressed when they start coming up at the same time in Spring?  Do they fight with each other for space, or crowd each other out, or deny each other light and water?  No, they somehow make it work.   And even when the weeds start to take over, they all still tolerate each other.  They all know what to do.  My personal lesson in all this is to be more tolerant of those who don’t act with kindness, or who don’t care about the good of the planet, or don’t have a particularly humanitarian philosophy.  I recognize that we are still all connected whether I want to admit it or not.

But perhaps my greatest challenge in the Tolerance department is for those nearest and dearest to me.   It is so easy to get annoyed or to need and demand perfection from them.  I want to feel like the two ribbons of blue in the mandala, entwined yet flowing in different ways and in a different rhythm.  I want to be working toward the sun and putting more and more consciousness into the tangle of green.  Coming through in the orange and pink flowers.  It’s all growing in its own way and in its own time.  And oh my, I want to be more tolerant of myself as well.  That dark spot almost in the center of the mandala.  The remnant of darkness from the Winter months.  The remainder of mistrust and doubt in my soul.