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In the year 2001, at the age of sixty, I discover the visionary outsider artist within me. Or perhaps she, the hidden inner artist, discovers that my primary focus of identity has become sufficiently permeable and flexible to allow her expression. In this way I can sense the value of the several personal rejections and an accident to my ankle that lays me low. Incident by incident, my world view and sense of who I am becomes increasingly open to examination.
When my ankle is injured and I am virutally bedridden for a month, my life review escalates in intensity. The combinaton of relative isolation, emotional devastation, mental questioning and lots of time for processing turns out to be a blessing. Those "zen master taps" from life serve to crack open spent crystallized attitudes and mind sets. This gives the opportunity for other latent or secondary parts of me to rise to consciousness and express their potential more freely.
The outpicturing of a long-suppressed childlike and nonverbal aspect of my psyche begins during this summer of 2001 when words seem insufficient to express what feels like inner chaos to me.
Increasingly, color and shape and line begin to flesh out my journal entries. I will pause to get a subjective sense of the day's flow and how I feel about the energies and events of the day. I immerse myself in feeling and intuiting and soon I find myself picking up markers and gel pens without thought or plan. Seemingly as though channelled, images begin out-picturing.
Sometimes I’ll draw with my nondominant hand and sometimes with both hands taking turns. All I have to do is to trust the process without judgement, criticism or expectation. In other words, as I settle into the now, I begin to nurture a part of myself who has been long without attention at all.
I delight in the flowing lines, the glowing colors, the vivid pictures that express through this new integration of my quixotic subpersonalities. How satisfying to discover the gripping visual creativity that has slumbered deep within for many decades!
As the months pass and my playful out-picturing continues, I become increasingly aware that this untrained, innocent and lively artistic expression is very important to me. My written journal facilitates my spiritual and personal evolution by providing a place where I can clarify my process to myself. My vivid pictures extend that perspective by allowing parts of me who have no words to express their experience and feelings too.
After the events of 9-11-01, I intensify my spiritual focus and service. Then comes my ankle accident and deepest inner crisis. It is at this time when words begin to arise to accompany the completed drawing. I record them in the margins of the page. Often, different words will arise each time I ponder the picture, different ways to express the felt-essence. I record them all. After a week or two I then choose the "caption" that feels most in vibratory harmony with the image.
This seems to me like a metaphor for right and left brain working together, for yin and yang balancing one another, for the reciprocal dance of my primary and secondary processes.
Sometimes I feel as if I am channelling probable selves, multidimensional alternate aspects of myself. Sometimes I feel like I am dreaming awake, that my drawing is my dreaming becoming conscious.
As my feelings pour into my art, I begin to know myself as an artist even though I have no training. Thanks to my explorations on the Internet, I have learned that there are words for my particular kind of art: visionary outsider art, referring to the visual creativity of people who are untrained and therefore outside the established and accredited realm of art.
My visionary outsider art seems to out-picture a healing, transformative process rooted in my human situation as I move toward my intuited wholeness. It reveals some of the subjective scenery along the path. It is one of the ways I have learned to celebrate the light and the darkness.
In 2005, after getting a digital camera, my creative focus shifts to digital art and photography. Playing in Photoshop also becomes a healing focus as well as my original art.
But that's a whole new story deserving it's own telling!
I hope you enjoy it all!
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