A little bit about my practice as a maker, where I thrive, where I struggle

It’s what I know deeply. Perhaps practicing presence in place keeps alive my aesthetic sensibilities as they seek their place in image and text. Through making images, I seek less a newness than a ripening, a sinking more deeply in the practice of making images/making self. It is so much about the ordinary, really, which I am and am in—and the extraordinariness of just that. You not long ago shared a poem by Tony Hoagland titled The Word. The following lines have stuck with me.

“Sunlight.” Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend… (Tony Hoagland, The Word)

The words remind me of the value in making images (and of sitting in the sun): it is like a friend, both the making and what is made. And who doesn’t want a friend to hang out with now and then, in the sun, in the backyard? Painting can become that friend for me as I attempt to make sense of psyche through making images. With a long career behind me in practicing and teaching a post-Jungian approach to art therapy, making sense of psyche through making art simply makes sense. I do it much of the time and have likely done it for a long, long time: I’ve worked at it forever in making and in teaching.

Over the years my artwork has often taken form in or found its way into handmade books. I appreciate the ability of books to hold what’s there in small spaces and to open and close, to unfold and fold up, revealing visual and textual information simply through turning or unfolding pages. Into a book’s pages, I might incorporate paint and pencil, stitched paper and dyed fabrics, natural dyes and dirt. I do not make in a single way but rather in response to what an image calls for, what it wants. Through content and structure, remembering through and mapping ways via books is close to my hands and heart. Folding and unfolding self, backward and forward, not unlike the way that concertina books unfold themselves leaf by leaf, revealing previously unseen connections—the folding in and unfolding out is ongoing. These days, I practice primarily with watercolor, a new medium and process for me. And I like what I am doing and what gets made as I try to live with “Nulla dies sine linea.” (Thanks to you and Paul Klee and Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) regarding the Greek painter Apelles for the words and the practice.)

While I am adept at facilitating the work of others, I’m less practiced at doing this for myself. But I do practice at it…looking at ways to stay present not only to the world around me and to self in the world but to exploring territory literally in the land itself, even if it’s just my backyard, and figuratively in image-making processes. I don’t know the way but trust making the path step by step and image by image, as I give form to self and the spaces in and around me, observing and writing and working at the tasks involved in soul making.

One intention I have as a maker this year

Recently I found a piece of writing made a few years ago. The words remain true to the way I work and understand the world through my work: In order to see, I must make. My work shows me where I am. In the folds and extensions, I see the ways forms interact, how entities engage and hold. Always, I must be shown [by what is there]. Only then can I see. For me, knowing is about seeing and being seen back. The river I am in/want to be in is one of making and looking at what’s made. Being in that particular river. And I do love rivers, even though I’m not so good at practices. They elude me. I can forget to carry them on from one day to the next, though the river carries me on regardless.

So, I seek the courage to stay in the river of making and looking, over and over again,
To uncover the image in my heart/the heart of the image.
When in the river, it will carry me.

For now, besides the river that carries me or the one that I walk beside, I will stick with the word “Sunlight”—the way it rests on the page, the way it moves across my back yard from morning through afternoon, illuminating the pink of a blossom and the greens of leaves in sun and in shadow, the tufts of grass emerging through desert dirt.

Thank you, dear Laurie. I appreciate you and your teachings.