Welcome to Episode 22 of The Painting Experience podcast. On the podcast,
founder Stewart Cubley explores the potential of the emerging field of
process arts and shares inspiration from his ongoing workshops and retreats.
Today we're revisiting a popular talk from a couple years back. In painting and in
life we all have those moments when the harsh inner critic appears. In this
episode, Stewart considers the source of this all-
too-familiar voice and prescribes a surprising course of action. [Stewart:] We all know
the experience, and certainly in painting, of the inner critic and of that
persistent and negative voice that is constantly projecting a judgment on our
painting that it's not good enough or it's lacking or there's some part of it
that I don't like. Something needs to be changed.
I need to get rid of it and start over. Then it can start to extend to other
people in the room: others are doing better than I am. We can start to travel
down that road of feeling a failure and feeling insufficient. The painting isn't
sufficient. It's proof of my insufficiency and so we begin to see
that the painting really is a reflection of our own internal process. And this is
an important step because if you just take it on the level of the painting, you
continue to believe there's something wrong with a painting and that if only
you fix the painting everything would be okay but it goes much deeper than that.
Because of the painting is a reflection, it's a mirror image of our own internal
life and the harshness of the inner critic is pointing at something.
It's revealing something to us if you're willing to take a look at it which is
the harshness and the criticalness we have of our concept of ourselves
and this deep sense of insecurity and insufficiency that we live with which
gets projected on the painting. So in a way the painting process becomes a way
of seeing this and you have to be ready to see this and willing to see this. In
other words, is this something that is of interest to you, to see this, otherwise it
becomes just a bother and it becomes a struggle that stays only on the level of
struggle, but if it's of interest to you: this whole question of the inner critic
and in the ramifications of that and the potential in that, then the painting
process has a way forward. It has a way in which you can begin to work with this.
So for example, it's not uncommon to come up against the judgment that my painting
is ugly and of course I hear this over and over and over again and there's a
certainty behind this, there's a sense of this painting is just an ugly piece of
crap . . . or perhaps one area of the painting. Another one is chaos: This painting just
it just doesn't hold together. I mean it's complete fragmentation; it's
it's just chaotic; it doesn't . . . nothing fits,
there's no sense in it that whatsoever; it just is a jumble, a meaninglessness . . .
another very strong critical voice. Another one might be that this
painting is too dark; it's depressing; it's just dragging me down. In all of
these judgments, there immediately comes to fore the sense to rectify it,
to fix it. And if it's too dark, the immediate reaction is to lighten it up.
Well, first of all, the immediate reaction might be . . . to any of these judgments . . . is to
get rid of it, cover it up, 'X' it out, burn it, tear it off the walls, start over again.
In other words, to not have the experience at all. But if you stick with
the painting and don't give in to that first impulse, that first reaction, then
the impulse comes to fix it, to make it better. All right so it's too dark I've
got to bring light into this painting.
It needs to be lightened up. I'm going to put a light color over everything. I'm
going to bring yellow in and it's okay to have a little darkness in this corner
here but I'm going to make sure that I balance it out with the lightness in
this other corner and bring in the spiritual . . . and I'm going to save the day.
Or if it's ugly, of course the converse would be to make
it pretty, to make it somehow pretty which again might mean covering it up.
In some way it means getting rid of the ugliness and bringing in the prettiness
if that's even possible and if it's too chaotic there'll be some way in which to
rectify the chaos, to bring order into the chaos and try to find a way to make
sense out of it to tell a story out of it, to at least salvage some remnant of
meaning which then would disarm the chaos. I think it's really interesting to
observe this in the process if you stay with the painting, these things will come
up. And if you've had any experience with this, you realize that they don't work.
That they lead to more frustration, they lead to staying in the soup of your own
struggle and they are depressing. They bring about a sense of smallness,
of blockage, of being caught. And so this is important, actually, to come up against
this, to see that it doesn't work -- that this sort of first impulse and reaction
of the mind to make things better doesn't work and so the potential that
exists within the painting process is rather counterintuitive and perhaps
rather radical it seems like, but it's to turn you towards it, in other words, for
you to actually go towards the offending notion. Whether it be ugliness or chaos
or darkness or whatever -- to actually go towards it which means to invite it, to
inhabit it, to engage it, to bring it on, to make it worse. Can you make it worse?
And so if the painting is too ugly, I'll often say could you make it uglier? And
of course the first reaction is, what are you kidding me? I hate this thing. It's
just too ugly, why would I want to make it uglier? But if you'll notice, if you
look internally at that moment when that question is presented to you, a door
opens. And you'll find that the brush knows how to make it uglier. And not only
does the brush know how to make it uglier but the energy actually gets a
little excited about making it uglier. I'd be . . . it's easy to make it uglier. There's
an immediate sense of release and you say, Oh, well I could make it uglier, no
problem! And we kind of want to slough it off, but no, the fact is it would be easy
and actually kind of fun to make it uglier . . . and the same with chaos. Could you
make it more chaotic? And you'll find that, Oh, yeah, no problem! I mean this
thing is just totally chaotic. I could make it more chaotic easily. Again, it's
easy. And a door opens and there's some energy there to make it more chaotic and
the same with the darkness or whatever judgment that is actually coming up at
that moment because of the key here is that the problem is our lack of
attention.
When you are rejecting something, you're keeping it at arm's length. There's no
surface area applied to it, there's no attention given to it, there's no inquiry
brought to that moment. It's all about rejecting, getting better, getting rid of,
overcoming, starting new. There's no entry into the actual experience and so by
entering the experience, by exaggerating what seems wrong,
by increasing the feeling, by going towards the feeling, by inhabiting the
experience, by bringing your attention into the experience, something
magic happens. And this is very difficult to describe, you have to experience it
but it's a transformation that after a few brush strokes of making this
painting uglier . . . Ah! . . . we start breathe. The energy shifts the brush is working on
its own. There's no more struggle and strangely enough we start to like it.
The judgment dissipates and we find: Wow, this is kind of cool, look how ugly this is
getting, look at these dark colors that I'm using. I thought that I didn't like
them but this is getting really kind of mysterious and interesting and deep.
And he chaos starts to feel good in the body. You find that the arm loves making
more chaos. There's a quality that starts coming into the painting and when you
look at it you start to feel it and you realize that there's an internal order
that's taking place. The painting may look disordered but there's a harmony
now that wasn't there before in the actual act of painting it, which is a
kind of order. And so all of these are examples of what it means to inhabit
your experience, to turn towards your experience. To use the tool of
exaggerating that which you find objectionable brings the attention more
deeply into the actual experience and you find that it was your keeping
yourself at arm's length from the experience which was the problem, which
was causing the blockage, and as soon as you gave surface area to that feeling,
as soon as you penetrated the feeling through expressing it in this way with
painting, that the magic happened, that the transformation happened and also in
a very profound way, the sense of insufficiency has disappeared. The person
who was resisting the painting and judging the painting has dissolved is no
longer there, that the resistance created the resistor, that the judgment created
the judge, one unitary process. And by keeping yourself at arm's length from
the experience, you create the isolation of the experiencer, and the loneliness of
the experiencer and actually the insufficiency of the experiencer which
is bound to feel insufficiency because it's isolated, it's not connected. This is
a profound understanding. The painting process allows a glimpse into something
that's happening on a daily basis. It's one of the foundations of consciousness
itself as this act of separation is creating the duality and the birth of
the self-image of the insufficient one and the struggle against that and the
constant effort to overcome that, to make it better, to improve -- whereas
the key is actually to turn towards what's actually happening and inhabit it.
And when you do that when you turn towards what actually happening and you
inhabit it, the sense of isolation disappears. The sense of that person
removed from the situation is gone. There's a naturalness, there's a natural
mind, you might say, that comes into play, that's connected . . . but it's not self-conscious.
So The Painting Experience is really an environment and a tool with which to
explore this question, which is certainly the question that's posed in any deep
form of meditation. How do I split myself up? What is the mechanism by which I'm
doing that, how do I stop doing that? And I think, interestingly enough, the
question of "How do I stop doing that?" cannot be answered on the same level as
the question. In other words, there's no technique. You can say well making it
worse you know or inhabiting the experience is kind of a technique but it
doesn't work as a technique. If you apply it as a technique, it's not going to work,
it'll become rote. You actually have to find a way to touch that which you
are afraid to touch. Because underneath the rejection is fear and to touch that
fear means to wake up, to be fresh, to not be relying on some sort of formula and
it's going to be different each time. That's the challenge and also the
incredible potential that exists within using art as a creative process rather
than as a product.
[Announcer:] 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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