ArtMaking as a Spiritual Process: Flow

Tonight was the February session of the ArtMaking as a Spiritual Practice seminar. We were a small bunch this month. Nita was recovering from the flu, Lynda had just hung her art show at NOVA Alexandria, and others were also not able to attend. Originally I planned on starting a process of making reliquaries for the "personal mythology inspiration cards" we began a few months ago. When I realized that so many would be absent, I decided, at the last minute,to change the plans.

"Now what shall we do?" I thought. "Go with the flow." Flow. Water. Watercolor....

First we had a conversation about the experience of "flow." What is it like to flow? When in your life have you experienced flow? We had a wide range of "flow experiences" including driving for long distances, cooking, being near water, looking at the BIG FULL MOON (it was very big this month), having time to do nothing, celebrating holidays, dancing, eating chocolate, exercising, doing mathematics, swimming, singing, doing anything or nothing after midnight ("after midnight" being the key feature of flow in this case), walking in nature, canoeing, sailing.

It is interesting to me, as it was to the others when we looked at the list, how many things involved water. Probably not really much of a coincidence, but interesting none-the-less.

So, what art project to do instead? Last month we did an exercise where we used the color palette from our eyes as the inspiration for a chalk pastel drawing. This month we did a similar thing using watercolors. The trick with watercolors is to let the water do the work. Years ago, I took a mandala workshop and gained a little piece of insight from the process. Even though we are not doing mandalas, nor are we using colored pencils, the insight still holds for the process we used here: "Let it flow. Let it Glow. Let it Go."

Here's our process... Wet the paper thoroughly. Saturate a paintbrush with a color of your choice and paint it on the watercolor paper with no thought of creating anything recognizable. Do this with colors of your choosing until the paper is full of color. Feel free to pick the paper up and allow the paint and water to move around and co-mingle in spots. Feel free to use a paper towel and blot up sections of water and color. Try to create a range of tones and hues. When you're satisfied with the results, let the paint dry. Either leave your painting as is, or feel free to go in with a finer paintbrush and a more delicate hand and use the paint and line and water to pull out an image. The idea is to not be rigid and perfectly realistic. Allow the colors and patterns on the page to suggest to your subconscious what it wants to appear. Be flexible and loose. This is a great exercise for practicing the art of allowing things to be.

Some of us did one painting, while others did several. Everyone worked at their own pace. The conversation moved in and out, with periods of deep concentration and almost perfect quiet to periods of lively exchange. In the end, we shared our art.

To close our circle for the evening, I opening up the book, Everyday Sacred, by Sue Bender, to a random page. Here's what it said:

An "inner light" radiated from the paintings.

The space was silent--with that respectful, muffled silence of a cloister. The word purity came to mind.

And immense.

This was the "immensity within ourselves" I had read about and hadn't understood.

"It doesn't always have to be so hard," I heard myself say--the judge nowhere present at that moment. There are other ways of "seeing"--these paintings seem to say. Other possibilities, infinite possibilities. Mysteries to be uncovered.

After our experience practicing "flow", we all agreed that this random reading perfectly summed up the essence of our evening together.