Art and healing... Art is healing

I guess the closest I can describe what I feel since yesterday is that something in me has turned a corner, in some way, some how. It is such an interior feeling that I cannot say why or where it came from. My mind surmises that it may have to do with the new moon/eclipse, the changes I’ve been making in my life, what’s emerging in my consciousness... and all of that may be true, at least relevant, but none of it touches that feeling directly.

‘Meeting’ Agnes Martin (see her painting above: Faraway Love, 1999) has taken me to a new place, yet it’s a familiar place because it’s somewhere I’ve longed to be for so long. A place at once tranquil and blissful, quiet and undoubtedly alive. To the best of my recollection, I haven’t been there since early childhood.

From what I’ve read and heard, there is a big cosmic shakedown going on in our universe. I think that explains why everyday the bag with the stuff of my life in it has been turned upside down and given a good shake until all sorts of odds and ends have fallen out, some familiar, some long forgotten, and some a total surprise. My task and my choice daily, is to sift through this stuff and decipher what they’re trying to tell me, and what they want me to do. This is one way to describe the work I’ve been doing for the last month or so. I can honestly say that this is not the kind of ‘work’ I ever thought I would do with so much time and energy devoted to it, as if it’s a livelihood, something I must do to survive.

This is the summary of feelings and reflections I have about what’s been going on in my life, what I’m up to – the kind of questions you might be asked if you run into an old acquaintance on the street, or a check-in email, and have to pull an answer out of yourself quickly that isn’t more than 2 minutes long but still stay true to yourself. “I just never imagined doing it full time.”, I might add this at the end if it were someone I think who might understand the awe of which I am captive.

Watching Art 21: Art of the 21st Century, the segment on the sculptor Richard Serra who makes enormous pieces of steel installations around the world. At one point he talked his memory of the time when he was 4 and his father took him to see ships being launched, probably the first time he was that close to something so mucher larger in size and power. He was the younger of 2 boys so he always drew pictures of whatever his father and older brother was doing, just so he could stay connected to them in everyday moments.

Sally Mann photographed the everyday, her children, her surroundings, family vacations, rawhide dog bone... ‘just for fun’, she said, except her fun, as far as I can see, is in capturing the ambiguity, as in a ‘twist’, in her image making, that’s the point of tension that is her signature. The documentary was unusual also because a lot of it was made up of interviews of her 3 children who were subjects for many of her photographs. Almost all of her own childhood photos were nude because she grew up in the south and her parents didn’t bother about clothing babies or keeping them properly indoors, so she ran wild and free on the land, with 12 boxers.

Pépon Osorio makes room-sized installations that looked like the inside of the man’s head, heart and viscera.

Kara Walker: her art is her therapy it seems, her terror, her neuroses, her compensations on paper.

Kiki Smith: the artist who was most certainly a witch in a past life – a self-confessed witch who grew up in an ‘Addams Family’ with death prominently displayed around the house: a headstone with the family name in the front of the house, clothing and objects (like dentures) from her father’s dead parents, death masks of her grandmother, her father and sister.

Korean-American artist Do-Ho Suh made his art out of his homesickness, and the duality of the individual vs. the collective, the most glaring disparity in existential philosophy between East and West.

Although these interpretations of these artists’ work are mine own, I think most would not fault my conclusion that we definitely make art out of the depths of our unconscious, because it is the need of the unconscious that we express it, or die.

Funny how I'm suddenly bowled over and can't get enough of art, personal and collective, when I barely stayed awake during art history classes in art college. Some karmic debts are paid in the same lifetime...