Welcome to this inaugural blog post. I intend to use this forum as a means of sharing my art process and to discuss how creativity influences my therapist and helping professional identity. My hope is to inspire myself and others to continue the work of healing though sharing a bit about my creative process, what I have seen work related to mindfulness and mental health practice, and to considering how we can address the larger and more encompassing problems that we can feel in our communities and culture. It seems well suited to begin this exploration by sharing a piece of artwork that I have been struggling through a process of completing over the past two years. The piece evolved over time in to the triptych displayed below, titled, “Reflections on the changing of the seasons.”
From right to left: “Spring to Summer;” “Summer to Autumn;” “Autumn to Winter” (2018)
Over the course of the last couple of years I have been through a tremendous amount of transition and change. I have left community mental health practice and ventured into private practice. In this transition, I have experienced grief and loss, tumult and uncertainty, and ultimately, incredible gratitude and energy towards the fulfilling process of cultivating and maintaining therapeutic relationships with a diverse population of incredible and inspiring individuals.
Within this work I have sat with many individuals who are experiencing their own processes of transition. Through loss and grief, through changes in relationships, through career and identity changes, and through addiction and recovery, I have been privileged to witness and support the processes of slow germination, cultivation, growth, harvest, of letting go and preparing for other cycles of growth.
And in these past two years, there has also been intense social and political upheaval that has upended some of our cultural norms and our sense of collective security. Our human dignity has been challenged through vitriolic exchanges and compromise of our principles in our political culture. Our connections with each other as a society are constantly put to the test through this caustic meat grinder, bolstered by the expansive isolation that has ballooned through the technological devolution of communication as exemplified by our often superficial and polarizing social media forums. We have to learn to adapt, to reconnect with ourselves and our community, and to rely more on ourselves, our families, and our communities in order to maintain values of dignity, respect, and honor. Many of us have had to dig deep to approach the past several years with both humility and intensity in order to hold to our hard fought values forged over countless generations of struggle and sacrifice.
The image displayed above was created amidst these changes and transitions relentlessly driving us forward. In the midst of personal, professional, and cultural transitions, I discovered that reflecting on the changing of the seasons gave a fitting metaphorical context to how our inner landscape can stay the same and be fundamentally different at the same time. This image evolved over the course of many months. It began as a bright yellow sky. The only remnants of this color are seen in the autumn leaves, which were scratched out from the layers and layers of paint and water soluble pastel in the very last stages of the image’s creation. From this point, a landscape emerged that seemed desolate and damaged. Somewhere within the unfolding of this landscape, there emerged some animals that have been prominent in many of my art works. The image became something that I struggled with; abandoning over and over through many months, seeing the image as somehow incomplete and not understanding what would give it a sense of completion; only to return and feel drawn to discovering where to this landscape is taking me again. Eventually as the autumn of 2018 began, I discovered that the process I slogged through would be a key to how to complete this piece. How the imaged evolved over time had to be the key to letting it go… to letting go of the transitions that it represented and making room in my life for more transitions to come. It was here that the piece began to take it’s current form, displaying a slow transition from spring to winter from right to left over the span of the three panels.
In each of these three adjoining images there is an animal that has manifested in my previous artworks. At the time that they entered into the process of painting, I wasn’t sure why they presented themselves. After reflecting on this process, and considering various cultural and spiritual traditional interpretations, their relationship in this landscape, with each other, and what they might symbolize in my own reflections on growth, transition, and change have begun to crystallize.
“Spring to Summer” and the spider
The spring panel features a large black widow spider that is crawling its way towards a prominent web on a tree that is budding with pink blossoms. Spiders seem to have a particularly fearsome and sometimes repulsive connotation in our collective mindset. In this image, the spider and her web seem to be signaling the renewal and rebirth of life seen during the springtime. As she weaves her web, she is planning and organizing, pulling together and preparing. The spider is a harbinger of power, potential, and choice. This is mirrored in the spring to summer landscape. There is a budding and sprouting and springing forth. This process is often beautiful when seen from a far and as a whole. When considering the details of springtime and new growth, there is present the pain of birth; the waking and spawning of the worms and bugs from hibernation and gestation; the filaments of the spiders web strewn and dew-struck amidst the trees
“Summer to Autumn” and the raven
The center panel in this image is the longest and it encompasses the beginnings of summer, spanning the length of the growing season into the beginnings of the autumn. In this panel, a raven is captured in the midst of taking off from (or landing onto) a robust branch of the very tree that the spider has nested on. The raven is an intelligent and crafty bird, known for its use of tool and capability to hold on to memories. There is a multitude of contradictions in the cultural symbolism of the raven. The bird is depicted as an omen of death, as a intermediary between the world of the living and the dead, as representing the void, the core, the force that picks at the bone of the fallen in battles. The raven is also seen as a symbol of prophecy and of insight. There is a connotation between the raven and the archetypal trickster, a clever deceiver and manipulator. I have known this animal symbol in my artwork as a protector and guide in the process of grieving loss. In a previous work the spider and the raven worked with each other to guide the soul of a lost love one to a place of rest. In this image the raven is facing away from the spider, seemingly locked in eye contact with the dove that inhabits the image’s final panel.
The raven and the spider as protectors and guides for the grieving (2013)
“Autumn to Winter” and the dove": on peace and tranquility, on the harboring of new life and new possibilities, new beginnings, new relationships, renewal
The final panel sees the landscape transforming from the bright light of autumn to the cold, white stillness of winter. This transition encompasses our processes of harvest and reaping the rewards of slow and careful cultivation, of preparing for a time of less plenty, and ultimately, of enduring a time of stillness, bleakness, and challenge for survival. Within this panel there is the most dramatic transition of the landscape and it is in this season that we seem to experience to most dramatic reflection on the transitions we endure and are blessed with throughout each cycle of our lives. Prominent in this image, there is a dove in flight in the sky, seeming to look back at the raven and the seasons before it. The dove has been seen as a harbinger of new life and new possibilities, of new beginnings and new relationships, and of peace and tranquility. In my artwork, the dove has been a frequent symbolic subject, sometimes serving as an emphatic witness to challenge. Most often, the dove has surfaced as a symbol of peace and resolution within the process of grief, a witness to the grief process that allows us to let go and open ourselves to what is to come after our grieving.
Detail of “Letting Go” (2014)
The landscape as a whole
Reflecting on the details of this images has been an arduous journey in itself for me. I have preferred to leave the symbolism of the images that I create to be interpreted by the viewers of the work, rather than imposing my own personal relationship with the symbols and images on to others. I have given away these images freely but protected the work itself from public consumption. The cursory exploration of this particular image through this blog marks what I hope will be something of a departure from a rigid holding to that philosophy. My art work has always been a way for me to make sense of my world, my role and my identity as a family member, a partner and friend, but most specifically as it relates to my role as a helping professional. This image has embodied a major shifting how I have defined these roles and, simultaneously, the imagery and symbols have related to the changes and transitions that I have been privileged to serve as witness and guide through in my work as a therapist.
Our inner landscape travels with us and guides us through the changes that we experience. The seasons of our life change; we move from snowy earth, to the dark and warm pools of fertile earth as the snow melts, to sprouting and budding and blooming, to spread and open leaves receiving warmth and light, to harvest and the bright light of culmination, to consolidation, and to giving to the new generation of ourselves through death. We see so many of these seasons change while our inner landscape changes imperceptibly, slowly sculpted and forged by the forces of the seasons. The animals that inhabit our landscape can can be ominous and scary or gentle and warm, but ultimately they are all messengers and witnesses, and gifts that we can learn from. They are part of the mystery and the beauty of our lives. And ultimately, we are similarly creatures within the landscape, witnessing and contributing to the mysteries of creation.