I recently came back to painting. You artists might understand how creating can help us recognize how we are doing and what we need to navigate life’s changes. We become more proficient at being flexible and adapting. We continue to learn to accept the way we and things are. We live with more courage as we become more resilient. There is no separation in aspects of our lives, even when we experience and set boundaries…even between work and play. We understand everything informs everything. We are always paying attention.

I also imagine myself talking to people who may not be creatives. We all are obviously at our own unique places as our own unique selves. In my life I have realized how it is I (commonly referred to as “me”) who must become/unbecome in the process of creating a painting. Maybe the word “must” is a strong word, but I could say it is how I create. I could even say it’s how we create. Myself described as the creative forces at work while I paint. Doing the work gets things flowing.

My paintings are often composed of layers of images. Sometimes these layers are observable as interpenetrating. Sometimes these layers are almost completely covered over. Often it is only after a work feels complete that I recognize these layers as necessary expressions of my own processing so I could arrive where I did. At many moments I question where the work could be going as I deny the desire to judge or stop until I arrive at the knowing that the painting is complete. You artists understand that initially it takes some time to begin to recognize when to pause and when something is complete. Sometimes we paint over something that feels or looks complete by some standard (and can be something we find beautiful), and we might be tempted to grieve that loss as we enter into the unknown again hoping for another beautiful resolution that might be the end of the work.

This way of relating with our process/ourselves/life is amazing isn’t it? But it can often feel like we’re living in a dream. Maybe in a way we are. Some days the dream feels heavier and people are like clouds in the sky telling us about the energetic weather. We exist in it but are not actors blown around by the script. Sometimes we seem to only observe while understanding we are not acting on the larger impulse we sense stirring in our environment. We learn when to observe, when to act, and how to be the cause in the varying degrees between. We learn how to exist within without absorbing, strain, and without resistance.

The recognition that it is us who must become something for the work to be born is powerful. We are embodying it first…while it is created. We don’t know what that outcome will be or what that journey will look like, but we do know truth in the sensation of our relationship with it and the trust we’ve forged in our understanding of ourselves. We, like our work, come alive layer by layer…year by year…work by work. We increase and we decrease. We inflate and deflate, and all to expand our capacity to experience the riches of potential and learn from everything.

Painting is not a comfortable process for me. It is obvious to me it is much of my subconscious becoming conscious. I say it is not a comfortable process not because of the engaged subconscious, but because being truthfully engaged proves natural tension and effort. The effort is not the kind of effort people normally think of because there is no trying. Rather, the effort of natural affect by cause.

Seeking seeks a purpose and it is no longer when it discovers itself.