Tag: healing

My Small World

by susanbradfordart, posted in Creative Process, Energy, Learning

KitchenWindow

I took this photo in the late afternoon. I wanted to capture the mostly glass objects in the kitchen window from the outside. It was kind of a joke. We were kidding around about how valuable they were, which they are not. And we were saying that we should have a photo for insurance purposes, and in case the Met wanted to buy the collection. So I took a photo, several actually. This one really struck me because of the reflection in the glass of the sky and the trees behind where I was standing. That was not what I was seeing at all. I just focused on the objects, and look what else I else got.

It reminded me how much we all mirror each other whether we know it or not. We know each other by knowing ourselves, and vice versa. “Just like me” as my friend Anita Bondi is so fond of saying.  When I took the photo, I only saw what was inside the kitchen window.  The mirror reflection showed how much more there was to see.  Just like life.  Just like me.

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My Four Seasons

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

The idea of creating a mandala for each of the four seasons came to me last January, at a time when I had been feeling pretty sure that I was finished making them.  And then, the concept just popped into my head, complete with subtitles for each of them, so I felt that I had to go through with the project.  Each one was worked on and completed within its own season.  Much to my surprise, it turned into a labor of love, and has been an amazing and healing way of learning about myself and how I feel, as each of the seasons revealed their sweetness to me  and yielded its position to the next in line.  Four circles (cycles) sitting inside the larger cycle (circle) of one year.  Perfect for a person like me who loves looking at almost everything in terms of circles and time passing.

Winter (Stillness) was about finding the quiet place inside myself, wrapping myself in a cocoon of silence, of safety, of protection.  Finding imagery to echo Stillness was quite a challenge.  But the most important lesson was to discover how much movement there could be within the Stillness of the winter months, how much opportunity for growth and change.  How bright it all really was.

Spring (Tolerance) held a kernel of an idea that somehow everything and everyone could work together toward growth and cooperation, toward the promise of blossoming.  But in reality, nature is messy and free and wild.  There is an unruly aspect to Tolerance.  Things are popping up all over the place, yet they all seem to know when and where to grow.  My lesson was strong and clear.  Get out of the way and let it happen.

Summer (Trust) became a way of finding renewed strength and confidence.  I always love summer, since  I was born at the end of July and feel my happiest during the heady part of summer that Leo rules.  This year, I learned to Trust my body more and to be more grateful for it.  In return, it allowed me to garden and to be creative and to keep learning about life and love, about getting and giving support.

Fall (Vulnerability) took me totally by surprise.  Originally, its subtitle was Surrender, but I realized that Vulnerability was more appropriate for what I was feeling.  It was supposed to have a leaf in the center, but that changed to a Falling Figure (a motif I painted many years ago).  I tried to turn it back into a leaf, but the figure demanded to be seen.  It is about everything being revealed in the Fall.  As the leaves fall, we see and are seen.  Both make us more Vulnerable.  I mourn for what I have lost.  I rejoice for what I have gained.  It is a bittersweet time.  And what I have learned is that being Vulnerable is okay.  Maybe not always fun, but always okay.

Summer Mandala (Trust)

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

 

I finished the Summer Mandala just a few days ago, and it signals the end of many summer tasks. I am not quite ready for it to be September. I’m never really ready for September, but this year it seems especially difficult. I want the sunny bright colors of the mandala to last longer. I want the flowers to stay around. I want the garden to keep growing.

I do love Summer! And I am working on Trust in so many areas of my life right now. Learning to trust that the strength and sense of flow that summer brings me can last into the Fall, even when it is rainy and gray.

I’ve completed three of the seasons.  One more mandala to go in my version of the four seasons.

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.