[Announcer]: Welcome to The Painting Experience podcast for September 2015. 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.
This month, Stewart takes a humorous look at why painting for process is important
even when you're not sure what the point is.
[Stewart]: It's often hard to justify the time
and the effort that we put into process painting because here you are painting
these paintings which really are not going to be used commercially. The point
is not to sell them, they're not going to be showing up in galleries, they're not
going to be making money, they're not even going to make you a name.
People aren't going to see them, mostly. On top of that they're not even
necessarily very pretty. I mean, sometimes, but a lot of the time the conventional
mind doesn't find the painting really attractive or pretty or or even pleasing
to hang in your room on your wall. Even meaning isn't something that can serve us;
there's often not even a story in the painting. Things appear and images show
up and one thing leads to another and it's a pretty long stretch to try to
string all this together with some coherent storyline. And I guess sometimes
we like to say well it's therapeutic, at least it's therapeutic. But this too
is a little bit of a stretch. There are times when you cannot find any kind of
insight or problem that's been solved or issue that you've been working on that's
been defined by the painting or that you can you actually say you're working on.
You're having feelings; the feelings guide you in the painting but you often
can't name them. You can't even say that you're dealing
with this feeling or that feeling so it's hard to explain to yourself and to
justify this bizarre activity of process painting. I think it's a very big
confrontation at times that this really rears its head and usually after a
certain period of time in which somebody has found the connection in themselves
with process painting. They're doing it, they're practicing it, and it's serving
them in some fashion and then all of a sudden this dragon raises its head. This
beast of justification: What's the point?
There's no product here. I hit this very
poignantly in my own development. I was in my 30s and we had been hosting The
Painting Experience and process painting for a number of years. And I was painting
regularly and I was also practicing Sand Play and Sand Play is a type of therapy
that was developed that uses figurines and objects and real-world items and
they're placed in the sand box. There's a sand box and we used to have four of
these in a room that was developed for this purpose. And we had shelves and
shelves and shelves of these figures and and there were dolls and there was
babies and there were spiders and there was red yarn that represented blood and
we had lightning and rain and I can't remember everything we could imagine we
actually had to make some of the things that were not so so readily available.
And we had these four sand trays in the room and we didn't use it therapeutically,
we used it from a process point of view. So, very often when someone was stuck or
at a dead end in their painting experience, we would bring them up and
have them do what we call the Sand Play. And it was often really powerful in
unlocking the creative flow again because, for one, the images and objects were
already created you didn't need to paint them so they were right there. And you
could just pick them up and put them in the in the sand and then you could act
really without thinking you would just see what you're attracted to and put it
there and into something else and put it there and this whole journey would
unfold. And we would not impose on it that there had to be any kind of
explanation of course or any kind of interpretation of what appeared in the
sand and it was really important to finish it and to go to the end of it and
usually at the end there was some sort of flow, the stream was opened again. And
it was possible to return to the painting and to continue so I would
often get up in the morning and do this the first thing. It was kind of a special
time because my thinking mind had not really awakened yet and kind of openness.
And I would go down to the Sand Play room and actually it was on the second
floor of this house in San Francisco. The first floor had the studio and it's next
to this window looking out over the street. It's early in the morning and I'm
still in my pajamas because I just gotten out of bed and and came into the
Sand Play room and I'm starting to build my Sand Play. And I pick up this sort of
doll it's kind of like a kewpie doll or I don't know what but it was a female
figure and I'm standing there and I see a movement outside the window and I look
out and here are these two young men, my age, in their 30s, dressed in their finest
with their suits and ties on heading for what I imagined to be the financial
district of San Francisco or some high paying job that they are pursuing and
making their way in the world. And they look at me through the window and here I
am in my pajamas standing with this doll in my hand playing in the sand.
I just wilted. I just got hit with incredible perspective of the friction of
these two worlds coming together. It was like what am I doing? Who have I become?
Playing with dolls? When I should be out in the world making my way and
developing a career and becoming important in some fashion. Or at least
creating a niche for myself. And here I am playing with dolls. This took me a
number of weeks to integrate. I had to really come back to the root and of
course I was supported by the early decision I had made to actually leave
more conventional activities and to not pursue my studies because I was called
by something that didn't quite fit and was not really so recognized and really
not so explainable. But at that moment it was a very challenging time for me to
justify what I was doing, because we live in a culture in which, if there's no
product, there's no point. It's drilled into us over and over again
from so many different angles and directions that that we have to have an
intention behind what we're doing, we have to know where we're going, we
have to know what our goal is, we have to know what it means to be doing what
we're doing and if you don't do that, you're lost. You're a loser. And I certainly
felt a loser at that moment I felt like a big loser. And on top of that, I didn't
even have a lineage to rely on. If I was meditating at least I could rely and
fall back upon the centuries of people who have been sitting in meditation and
the wise words of the Masters and the encouragement of the community. But here
in process painting and playing in the sand
there's no lineage. There's not much of a lineage; it's pretty "out there" and
it's not really recognized. And this is an incredibly poignant moment
for me. I think it was at this time that I came to realize that this practice was
something that was not going to be easily sanctioned by society at large.
And that it was forever going to have an outsider status, it was never gonna fit.
And I think this was the struggle that I was feeling at that time, was that I was
trying to make it fit. And there was something incredibly releasing about
realizing, wait a minute, it's not going to fit. It's never going to fit.
It shouldn't fit. It's not even meant to fit. That this practice of process arts is a
probing of the essential freedom in human nature that is not usurped by
definition and structure and interpretation and intention or
motivation. It's something incredibly wild.
So when I see people come up
against this crisis which often occurs after a certain period of time in which
they've given over to this creative force in themselves and felt the
nurturing aspect of it and felt how fulfilling it is and then get slammed by
this question of "What am I doing?" How do I justify spending my time accomplishing
nothing. I see this as a very fruitful confrontation because basically it can't
be justified. It stands on its own for what it is. It represents the mystery
within the human psyche and so the real question is: "Are you interested in
rubbing shoulders with the mystery?" I hope you are.
[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 Stephan Jacob. We thank you for listening
and hope you'll join us again soon.
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