Creating Anew

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of every day life.” -- Pablo Picasso

While the word "art" does conjure images of paintings or sculptures by the greats, a key driving purpose for this blog is to identify and raise to light artistic processes that permeate life, or can if we choose to let them. The process of clearing a table, or a worktable, and focusing just on making one thing sets up a way of both accessing one's inspiration and translating it immediately into form.

We pinch a pot, or paint a still life, or draw a dream, or journal our gratitudes. This clear, clean time of simply making has the potential to be quite sacred. Imagine a time at your worktable in which you light a candle and invoke angelic support. Imagine that when you organize your calendar, you are invoking blessings and gratitude into each event, asking that your life be guided by the expression of your highest light. This is an artistic act. What if you set aside 20 or 30 minutes each morning to make room, to draw simply what comes to mind as inspiration?

I love this work by John Coltrain, a kind of doodling that shows his genius here, where he is attempting to represent "math as music," which in turn shows up as sacred geometry. Or in a more rigorous light, consider the wild work by Geogiana Houghton, a 19th century mystic who claimed that she did "automatic painting." Witnesses claimed they saw her paint these fine, intricately ordered abstracts while talking to guests:

Art has the capacity to be the means by which we become conduits for divine expression. I don't mean to make this sound too other-worldly, but i'm passionate about people having this opportunity to conceive their lives as creative acts. Try this: using just one sheet of paper and three colors, jot down three words that hold value for you, like love, or truth, or will, or justice; then doodle for a few minutes while holding those words in your mind. When we focus on an idea and use more than one aspect of mind to work with it, it takes on more power.