I find my tribe

Years ago I took a deep breath and leaped in the deep end of an immersion course in French – in France. One of our assignments involved presenting a lecture to the class about our professional work. I took out my PowerPoint slide-show and staggered along in my very basic French as images of my artwork appeared on the screen. My classmates were very supportive, and so was the tutor. At the end he said, “Vous êtes une vrai créatrice!”

I thought, Hey, that’s cool. I feel more like a “créatrice” than an artist; I’ve never really found my niche in any of the sub-groups that make up the contemporary art world. As I’ve written on the wonderingmind website, I don’t really have things to say – I simply have things to make.

It’s amazing that, given the complexity and scope of the English language, we have no word for people who see themselves as run of the mill creators or créatrices. The former term is reserved for holy books, and the latter doesn’t exist. And we certainly have no word for the artisan whose work is not planned or premeditated and who has little or no mental construct regarding the finished product or how it will be achieved.

But the French do. It’s bricoleur.

“Bricolage … is a French word that originally meant something like the English tinkering and, referring to the way the home handyman, for example, makes do with whatever tools and bits of material he happens to have to hand, improvising where necessary. This homely term was raised to the status of a theoretical concept by the late Claude Levi-Strauss, founder of structural anthropology, in his book La Pensée Sauvage (1962; translated as The Savage Mind, 1966).

The bricoleur, in Levi-Strauss’s account, becomes the paradigm for the way of thinking of tribal people, as opposed to what he calls the “engineer”, who epitomizes the rational and scientific mind. The engineer plans his operations in advance, secures the appropriate equipment and materials, then carries out the project. The bricoleur feels his way towards solutions, without conceptualizing the project from the outside, and essentially by rearranging the already available materials.

Ultimately, this is part of a cultural fabric that changes and adapts, but without progressing in a linear or historical fashion.”
~ Christopher Allen, art critic: Object Lesson in The Weekend Australian Nov 14-15 2009

Les Bricoleurs are my tribe. I love the notion of being part of a creative culture that “changes and adapts” leaving no historical trace and possessing no need to “progress”. Like life itself, the work of the bricoleur flows endlessly out of the immensity of the moment – and includes the materials and equipment at hand, the techniques and skills amassed, all stirred up with the content of one’s consciousness at that moment in time. The bricoleur remains clueless as to what might end up on the canvas, the paper, the loom. She makes. And later – sometimes years later – meaningmind catches up with wonderingmind and a title appears on the work. And she thinks, Crikey! So that’s what that was all about!

what my eyes saw on the way

In the silence of drawing
hidden, yet visible, in each face
I see the Face of faces,
see:
that the plural of man
does not exist,
is our cruelest hallucination -
see that our Oneness is infinite differentiation,
see:
that the pattern of the universe
and mine
are not-two,
that what lives in me
is the Tao
in which all lives.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I BELIEVE
BUT WHAT MY EYES
SAW ON THE WAY.

Having become
all these faces, all these bodies,
a meadow, a flower,
a night moth and a cow,
A STRANGER NO LONGER
I AM AT HOME,
BELOVED EARTH!

~ Frederick Franck – The Awakened Eye

Frederick Franck was one of my most important teachers. He taught me how to see, how to draw as though my life depended on it, and how to live. My website ‘the awakened eye’ is dedicated to him and his vision.

See also:
Frederick Franck’s to-do list

Find more info about Frederick Franck at the awakened eye website

creativity will never make sense

Naturalness, spontaneity, and playfulness are all aspects of the ordinary mind that catches a glimpse of the world of things just as they are.

To live this life fully means to see all of it.

The doorway to this experience is the creative process.  Please delve deeply into it.

Give it a chance to do what it is capable of doing.  Engage it fully with the whole body and mind.

If you do, sooner or later, this limitless way of being will be your own.

It will never make sense, and you’ll never be able to explain it to anybody, but you will experience it, and by so doing, you will make it real.
~ John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity

Homage to John Daido Loori, who left us on Friday. Gratitude for all that he shared with us as a fully human being and taught us as a Zen Master. And for his inspiring insights into the creative process, shared in his books and revealed in his exquisite photography.

For more on Daido Roshi, please visit his pages at THE AWAKENED EYE website:  the zen of creativity and john daido loori

photo: Floating Rocks copyright John Daido Loori

a wild dance of wondrousness

It utterly overwhelms the imagination to consider the size and complexity of our cosmos with its billions of galaxies and trillions of planetary systems, all partaking in a continuous flow of creation. How can it be so vast, so subtle, so precise, and so powerful?

Metaphorically, we inhabit a cosmos whose visible body is billions of light years across, whose organs include billions of galaxies, whose cells include trillions of suns and planetary systems, and whose molecules include an unutterably vast number and diversity of life-forms. The entirety of this great body of being, including the fabric of space-time, is being continuously regenerated at each instant.

Scientists sound like poets as they attempt to describe our cosmos in its process of becoming. The mathematician Norbert Wiener expresses it this way:  ”We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves; whirlpools of water in an ever-flowing river.” Physicist Max Born writes, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.” Physicist Brian Swimme tells us, “The universe emerges out of an all-nourishing abyss not only 12 billion years ago but in every moment.”

~ Tom McFerran

and then along came Lu

I dug out my Zen and Taoist texts, poked around online encyclopedialand, and found that Mu and Ku are Japanese words with – to the uninitiated – apparently similar meaning.

Mu: lit. nothing.  Space, emptiness, clearness, transparency.

Ku: lit. sky, space, mouth.  Three-dimensional void, sunyata, emptiness.

Wu is a Chinese Taoist word.  Lit. not have, without.  Commonly used to indicate not-being, creative quietude, letting-be.  Not too far out of step with Mu and Ku, it seems to me.

Then I looked up Lu.  Unsurprisingly it’s a shortening of Louisa, and guess what?  It means famous warrior and light.  I don’t know about the warrior bit, but I love the light. 

And I love the way my work teaches me all I need to know.

Lu.  (220 x 220)  Detail from scroll.  (980 x 355)
torn khadi papers, stainless steel gauze, acrylic paints, lurex threads

a kakemono called ku

How do you pull a name out of the wordosphere to title a work that has no conceptual basis? Often artists resort to “Untitled” or a cluster of letters and numbers that would look more at home inside a computer’s database. I’ve resorted to using “Untitled” a handful of times, but mostly I find that the work will tell me its name – and its story too – if I am patient and empty. The scrolls that I’m posting details from at present reeled their names off like tiddlywinks as soon as they had found their format – ie, the kakemono or scroll. Mu. Ku. Wu. And Lu. Hmmm, thought I, what means this?

Ku.  (220 x 220)  Detail from scroll.  (980 x 355)
torn khadi papers, gauze, acrylic paints, lurex threads

antidotes for creative constipation

I’ve been pottering away with color and texture, dyes and pigments, paper and textile, for almost half a century.  Mostly incognito, outside the commercial circuit.  And by great good fortune, with astonishing students to guide me.

Two things have driven my practice.  First and foremost, an addiction to the mysterious movement of creativity as it takes over and renders me (artist-designer-me) redundant.  Then, and this is a flow-on from the former, inquiring into what steps – if any – can be taken to invite, encourage, cajole or coerce that movement to come and play.

Now that I’m longer in the tooth it’s obvious that my preoccupation with a kind of religious experience – which manifested for me in the studio – was a crucial part of my wider search for non-dual understanding.

My life took me down the neti-neti superhighway.  I ended up with teachers like Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj and Wei Wu Wei, who unpicked my felted fantasies with their ruthless questions.  And as far as the specific topic of creativity was concerned, it was David Bohm who was my mentor – not a visual artist, but a physicist!

This little preamble is my way of explaining that I’ve always been more interested in what sabotages or prevents creative working and thinking, than defining what it might be.  I now suspect there’s no computable answer to the latter.

Over the years I’ve experimented with many activities to see which ones might be effective antidotes to the creative constipation we call ‘block’.  When I’m in a painterly mood there’s nothing better than simply getting out the tubes and mixing hues.  Simply mixing, mind you.  No plans, no designs.  I just mix; I make tonal ladders and color ladders.  I simply worship and celebrate color without any agenda.  By the time a morning (afternoon, day, sleepless night) has passed, I’m overflowing with ideas.  Color does that to me. 

If the painterly mood is awol I tear things up.  Sometimes I tear up ho-hum work and weave it into – whatever.  Sometimes I tear up lovely hand-made khadi papers from India, or washi and tenguji from Japan.  Then I collage them down, avoiding figurative temptations, just overlapping and juxtaposing.  Sometimes the fragments are already colored, sometimes not.  But I find they will always ask for light and shade so out come the tubes.  Color goes on.  Breathstrokes might float across the surface.  Stitches too. 

The names come much later.  As E H Gombrich always insisted, “Making always precedes matching.”

Mu.  (220 x 220)  Detail from a scroll.  (980 x 355) 
torn Khadi papers, acrylic paint, light-reflective paint, gauze