Welcome to The Painting Experience podcast for July 2015. On the podcast,
founder Stuart Cubley explores the potential of the emerging field of
process arts and shares inspiration from his ongoing workshops and retreats.
In this episode, Stewart tells part one of his own story how he left his path as
a scientist to follow a call that led him first into the Alaskan woods and
then to the discovery of The Painting Experience. [Stewart:] People often ask me how I got
started in The Painting Experience and was I originally trained as an artist
and where did it all begin? And I must say it's been a rather
roundabout route because my original training was in math and physics and I
had really no connection with art, no training in art and as a student often I
have to admit felt a little prejudiced against artists because they seemed to be
rather foreign to me in terms of what their intentions were and, secondly,
they would sometimes hang around the Student Union Building looking a little
grubby and self-important and certainly just not part of my milieu, and I could not
understand what art was all about so . . . had really no personal connection to
painting or art whatsoever and it was in my late 20s when I hit a brick wall.
I was a year away from my Ph.D. in geophysics studying at the Geophysical
Institute which is part of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and I
had the realization that was creeping up on me for some time, but finally I could
no longer ignore it which was I just wasn't interested. The life of continuing
to be a scientist and what that entailed and the details of that just utterly
bored me. Part of the handwriting on the wall was that I had found myself
much more interested in the lives of the scientists and the creative process by
which they made the discoveries rather than the details of the math and of the
science itself and I literally reached a dead end because I just could no longer
do the work. I would go to my office in the morning and just found that I could
not focus and was utterly bored by it and made the decision to leave, and this
was a fairly radical turning point for me given the number of years and the
amount of investment that my parents and I had made in developing this livelihood,
in this career. And I decided literally to stop and one day walked into the
director's office at the Institute and announced that I would be leaving. In an
effort to dissuade me, he began to tell me about a recent study that he had read
that by the time you reach 30 your brain cells are starting to deteriorate. It's
downhill after that and if you're going to make a contribution to science you'd
better do it now or forever regret your decision. I actually took this as
encouragement and it made me feel even more so that I was needing to make this
decision. The difficult part was that I had no alternative it wasn't as though
I was leaving one course of study for another opportunity. I had built a cabin
outside of Fairbanks off the grid, off the road, and what I really felt
attracted to doing was going and living in this cabin and
to be alone because part of the attraction was the solitude, the
quietness, the simplicity, and just a chance to get off the merry-go-round . . .
a chance to stop this rather insane rush towards creating a life and to take
stock of actually who I was, what my feelings were, what I was really
attracted to and what I felt like doing. So I essentially disappeared into the
woods and spent the next three and a half years living by myself in this
cabin and I have a memory of the beginning of the winter and we'd gotten
our first snow and I invited my graduate school buddy and I gave him all my books
and all my notes from years and years and years of studying the mathematics
and the physics and all of the science courses and I piled his toboggan high
and lashed all these books down onto the toboggan and watched through the window
as he slowly pulled it down the trail. And it felt like I was watching my life
as I knew it go down that trail and I was left with this incredible excitement
of being naked and alone and without a plan in my own cabin, of my own making, in
the deep forest in northern Alaska and encountering the unknown in a very
exciting way. I did live very simply. I was vegetarian at the time. I grew my own
sprouts and made my yogurt, baked my bread and was able to give special care
to the details of living without feeling rushed. I could spend hours sitting
in my rocking chair by my wood stove with my cup of tea looking out the
window, paying particular attention to the
changing seasons, to the light changing during the day, the
environment, the weather as well as my own internal states and this became really
my focus during this time, which is . . . I found that I was not interested in
distracting myself through reading, through radio, through news. In fact, I
didn't even have a radio. I spent a lot of time with yoga and becoming really
physically sensitive to my body as well as to meditation . . . a lot of time spent in
the woods on skis and snow shoes and hikingm maintaining the cabin was also a
full-time job, really, because I heated with wood and to do that I would have to
go into the woods and find dead trees and cut them down and pull them back on
a sled to the cabin and cut them up and split them. I melted snow in the winter
because there was no water source there . . . carried water in the summer. Just found
myself living as a young man in a pioneering spirit that was very exciting,
felt very fulfilling . . . even though I had no idea what was going to become of the
rest of my life. I knew during this time that I was doing the right thing and I
felt grounded. I felt in touch with my environment. I felt in touch with my
internal environment. I would sometimes go a month without going into town. I
really didn't need much. I had a little savings from the university and so I
didn't need to work and I would sometimes go weeks without seeing
another person, which really suited me at the time because I found that in that
solitude I was able to open . . . among the trees and the local animals and the
safety of this little woods where I knew no one was really going to drop by
unexpectedly, which was very rare that they did . . . that I could afford to open up
and to be myself in a way that I had never been able to do in my life.
So there was something really satisfying about finding this sanity . . . living in a
way which became really clear to me which was much more sane than living
amidst the pressures of so-called society. I felt like okay I'm going
to become some weird Alaskan hermit for the rest of my life. I mean, I couldn't
see myself ever doing anything else and that scared me a little bit. I was
kind of worried about what I was going to become but of course
Alaska's full of eccentrics. It's actually sort of expected and even
celebrated in Alaska and those sorts of people, my sorts people, were attracted to
that and I I felt very at home with it. My parents thought I was kind of going
off the deep end, I'm afraid, but they really tried to support me in the best
way they could but, of course, they didn't understand . . . and I found that I wasn't
even able to read during this period. Reading was a distraction that pulled me
away from myself in most cases . . . even spiritual books I found to be disturbing
because they seemed to be kind of a crude injunction to improve and I was
tired of improving. I didn't want to improve. I wanted to be with myself.
I wanted to be with actually what was happening rather than trying to get
somewhere. My whole life had been "going somewhere" and now I'd stopped and so I
found reading to be pulling me away from myself, in most cases. So the attention
became very inward and there were definitely dark times that arose. There
were times when I really didn't trust what I was doing and felt that I was
some weak wimp hiding from life in the woods and unable to cope . . . and there was,
of course, dealing with a lot of self- judgment and lack of trust both in
myself and in my actions. I think that this was really the
essential question that brought me into the woods in the first place, which was:
Could I trust, could I trust my ability to live on my own? Could I trust my
ability to be in the wilderness? But deeper than that, it was really could I
trust my own being? Could I trust myself? Could I trust my own feelings? Could I
trust my ability to meet whatever situation arose? Could I trust myself to
be sensitive? These were all questions that were with me during this time and
were answered experientially just through my being alone. So I continued to live
this very simple life for many years in this little cabin that was only ten feet
by 16 feet. It was built according to a sacred ratio called "the golden mean," and
it was tiny. It had a little porch with an overhang for my loft and sleeping,
but it was really, really tiny . . . but I felt like I could spend the rest of my life
there. But then, during the spring of my fourth year something started to shift
and the cabin started feeling small. I resisted it at first but it became
pretty clear that something needed to change and I realized that there was a
force that had pulled me into this experience. There was a . . . there was an
internal attraction and a draw to go into this cocoon-like existence and now
there was a force that was wanting me to push out of it. It was time to leave at
least, in my mind, for a visit. I thought, "Okay, I'm going to go and explore the
world a bit and then come back to my safe abode in my little forest here
outside of Fairbanks." And I was sitting in meditation one
morning prior to leaving and I had a vision. I had no idea what it meant,
what to do with it and I forgot it very quickly and it was only years later that
this vision was remembered and of course then made a lot of sense . . . but in
the vision I was in this rather large room with a lot of people and there was
color everywhere. There was this brilliant color coming from all sides
and there was an amazing energy in the room. There was something going on that
was very very exciting but as I say I had no context for this and so
immediately, I'm sure, just forgot it and a few weeks later shouldered my backpack
with my tent and sleeping bag so I could be self-sufficient and I headed
down the trail, to the road. I must say the metaphor of this moment was not lost
on me, to feel myself now leaving this little cabin behind me in my little
woods and the transformation that that really had represented and to be
entering the world again but from a very different perspective. I felt like I was
a blank slate and and now I was ready to be written on. I'll continue this story
and the next podcast. Stay tuned.
You can learn more about The Painting Experience and find a list of upcoming
process painting workshops by visiting our website at www.processarts.com.
If you enjoyed what you heard today, please share it with a friend.
The theme music for this podcast comes from Stephen Jacob. We thank you for
listening and hope you'll join us again soon.
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