Art on the Inside

Reminder from Mano: Take time to rejoice in the beauty the color angels create to herald dawn and dusk with sunrise and sunset.

A major attraction of the man who became my husband was that he had a magnificent dedication to art. It was not just the outer details of painting, sculpture, poetry, opera, or film that he could explain, but he could, with passion, trace worthy artistic creations back to essence and link them to enduring human aspirations and needs. I knew I would be able to learn from him and to deepen my own sensibilities. The downside was that he had very high standards and little interest in the idea that we are all artists, that our souls and spirits are enlivened by the very act of turning inward to create art—regardless of the outcome. I found my own artistic voice retiring behind admiration for the great works.

I would say that teaching in a Waldorf school awakened my inner artistic desires, and even though in my objective art-critic mind I knew I would never be THAT kind of artist, my heart began to sing with the drawing, painting, music, movement, and drama that wove daily through my Waldorf days. Lately I have been using a book by Laura Summer, Fifty-Two Weeks, which has loosely guided art exercises to Steiner’s “Calendar of the Soul” verses. What I discover over and over is this: after a minute or two of adjustment from my outward-looking concerns about doing it right, producing something pleasing to others—being able to produce anything at all–I begin to work more quickly, reawakening or pulling up something from deep within, generating concentrated energy that is separated from my head. I slow down and speed up again, varying the search for what lives there in my very soul and enlivened by my desire to reach into it.

For me these artistic practices enhance my meditative journeys, and still I am more inclined to do them in spurts and then temporarily forget their necessity. A friend who belongs to a weaving guild recently described the artistry of a woman who had spun 13 perfect skeins of cotton. The immense patience this required, she felt, was more important, more significant a deed, than the sometimes slapdash art we used to do as Waldorf teachers. I think she was talking about the satisfaction of perfecting a skill—refining, refining, listening—until the knowing enters your blood and your nerves and muscles. You attend and your body knows what to do and can lift into another dimension.

I would not want to choose, or judge, between these efforts, since I think that all striving to cultivate such inner spaces is valuable. It does occur to me, though, that Barbara has reached some sort of combination—patiently through the years working to paint with skill and truth, as well as spontaneously mixing her feeling life with the paint. Several of these Council of Gnome blogs have been dedicated to Barbara’s art, her ink stick drawings (December 2014), little squiggle drawings (July 2014 and February 2016), kerfuffle drawings (January 2015), her Burned Woman paintings and general dedication to “art as a cultural deed” (March 2016).

“Art has been my healer and revealer,” she often says. “The healing comes in many ways. In my lack of self-consciousness, I am totally free just to paint for myself; it doesn’t matter what others think or say. I am free to enjoy the process, wonder, and revelation of one color next to another. Inside of me a confidence grew over the years that I could paint something original and different. I stopped painting still life and opened to painting energies and feelings, following any pictures that revealed themselves to me. Painting gave me a way to express with color, and working and playing with color has been a lifetime passion. For me, color is an expression of God’s love; it’s how everything ends up coming back to God. As a child of three I received from my mother a ream of colored paper and spent hours arranging the colors around me in patterns. When she gave me a paint set, I squeezed the paint from the tubes rather than actually putting it to paper; I wanted to experience the paint itself in all its colorful intensity. Color led me into my love for painting as an adult and allowed me to calm my worries about not drawing well. In one of my dreams, a gardener who miraculously heals ailing plants said, ‘I just wrap them in rainbows and they get well.’”

“I had always wanted to paint but could not draw like my Aunt Carolyn or Cousin Pat so I thought I could not paint. One day I read, ‘If you have a strong desire to do something, God has also given you the ability.’ Soon, a friend enthusiastically shared the fun she was having painting with an eccentric artist. I decided to join the class, only to find that the eccentric artist had eloped with one of his students. In his place was a solid, distinguished artist, Oscar Van Name, who had stepped in to hold the class together. Oscar was not flamboyant but he was an excellent teacher. He impressed upon me that the simplicity of painting is to think in terms of using color and small shapes to build larger shapes into the finished painting. He encouraged me to keep exploring until I had the feeling: ‘I know I am finished.’ He taught me not to be afraid to over-paint and lose a picture but to trust that my first effort was just a first step: I could build more on top of it. This is the same process Mano later used to guide me in my paintings.”

“There was a time when I felt depressed, tired all of the time. With four children, my church activities, and a busy family, I found myself dragging an exhausted body around. One morning I woke up and felt and saw a hand reaching out of the heavens to take my hand and lift me. The voice said, ‘You can’t think your way out of this. You can paint your way out.’ I set up a watercolor pallet, fresh water brush, and a pad of paper. Each time I walked by I put some color on the paper. The next morning I was reviewing an experience with my friend Maria. I had had energy in the morning, but after the telephone conversation with her I realized I was once again exhausted. As I was wondering about this, the inner voice said, ‘Resentment kills the spirit, and when the spirit dies, the body dies.’ I had been dragging a dead body around for weeks. With this revelation I was shown my attitude of resenting all that I had to do, without having enough time or energy to do it. I realized I felt resentment when Maria wanted me to do something for her I felt she could do for herself.”

“The process I used for healing was one of observation and revelation. I observed the times when I lost my energy—after talking to Maria, for example. Then I would see a picture or get a thought about what to do next. This is the same process I use when painting from the inside. After putting color on the paper I observe what has been going on. Then I suddenly know how to move forward: the revelation.”

“I was once asked, ‘How does God show you that s/he loves you?’ The answer that popped into my mind was, ‘Through color’. Each of the seven colors of the rainbow has a specific power and gift. Angels and elementals carry the powers of each of the colors, each of the rays. When I did color healing, the colors I put on the paper opened me to receive angelic blessing and soon revelation.”

“Another step in this painting process was how images revealed themselves as I simply put colors on the paper—gnomes, a face on the side of Half Dome, beings appearing in the shapes that made up a bowl of fruit. Angel wings and bodies appeared in loose watery paintings. So many appeared over the years that I began to believe that these nonphysical beings were actually real and reaching out to me through my paintings. Painting has now become a communication system with Mano and Rama, my non-physical teachers.”

“When I am upset, I have been guided to go to the studio, turn the sound system on loud (I usually play Beethoven’s Pastoral), and splash color on paper. I do this until my mood shifts and I feel totally free of the upset. It is now all out on the paper in wild splashes of color. Either then or later I often continue to paint to bring harmony or allow new pictures to appear in the mix of color and shape.”

“The drawing I do while I’m sitting in meetings has revealed the energies present in the room, or the aura of a person. I used to do individual essence drawings for people at a psychic fair in San Luis Obispo. After doing the energy drawing I would interpret what the colors said to me about the person. The responses were very rewarding and encouraging and supported my knowing that I was being guided. Once I did two 18-year-old twins. The images for one of the boys looked like outer space planets and stars; the other was a simple quiet flow of color. The one with outer space energies said it was true; he thought constantly of the galaxy and universe. The other boy was happy hanging out in the garden in quiet spaces. My self-confidence and self-acceptance of what came out in my drawings opened me to receive the paintings Mano and Rama gave me when I moved to the Mountain and opened the Council of Gnomes.”

“A dear friend of mine called me after visiting with me on the Mountain. She had gone back to school to get a degree in art and told me she had pondered over my art work for a long time. In essence everything I did was ‘wrong’ according to what she was being taught in school, but somehow I made it work. This was very similar to what Minerva, my dramatic, flamboyant teacher of abstract painting, had to say after I had been painting with her for two years. I had the habit of painting a red line along the nose of the face. Focusing on the nose in that way was all wrong, she said, but somehow I made it work, so she never told me otherwise. When I started painting with Minerva I did not know Rama or Mano, but they were definitely guiding me even then. I had the message that even though it was hard, If I stayed with Minerva for at least three years I would know everything she had to teach me. Then I was to paint at home until I knew what I needed to know next, before finding another teacher who could give me exactly those next steps. They also told me that it would be six months before I liked anything I did in my painting classes with Minerva. After months of ‘yucko’ paintings, Minerva looked at one that was dark shades of red and black and said, ‘Barbara, now you are going to make it. With this painting you have gotten down to your guts.’ And it was so; from that time things shifted and I enjoyed the process. It was here that the gnomes started to appear. No one else really saw them, but they were clear and obvious to me and a total wonder and mystery since I didn’t believe in their reality.”