Creating and Defining Studio Space

If I had one word to describe my dream studio it would be sanctuary. Sanctuary calls forth the notion of preserve and reserve, both referring to protecting and/or storing. My most valuable possessions are kept in my studio, inspirational resources and the raw materials for art making. My studio also houses finished pieces, as well as those works in progress, the pieces most alive in my being right now.

More important than the space however, is how the studio functions. Sanctuary also means to consecrate, sanctify or dedicate which is getting closer to what my studio is for me. How do you sanctify a corrugated tin industrial hanger with 30 foot high ceiling and a stained uneven cement floor? Luckily my twelve years of living and working through various apprenticeships in Japan gives me a sense of where to start. I start with the floor.

For me, sanctuary in the Japanese sense is created in two ways. One is physical and the other is a mindset. To create a sanctified inner space, it is necessary to delineate the different between sacred and mundane. To mark the outside world from the studio space, we take off our shoes before stepping onto the white carpet. Yes, white carpet, but not hospital white, a textured oatmeal-white. We do have to spot the carpet regularly with carpet cleaner. In workshops we often use the floor for somatic exercises. In the on-going painting groups we paint with acrylic in a large format against the walls with strips of drop cloths, which we also used for construction activities rather than using tables.

The aspect of the studio that maintains sanctuary is the mindset of mindfulness. Getting out of the habitual mind requires a quieting of the internal chatter in order to connect to deeper wisdom of the body and heart. Mindfulness is a particular kind of meditative attention, which in the studio engages authenticity, spontaneity and reflection. In production work in Japan, in a ceramic studio, kimono dyeing factory or a paper making village, mindfulness is an essential discipline which is easy to track by how carefully you use the work space and handle materials.

I have not lived in Japan since the eighties, but it continually creeps into my dreams, paintings, conversations and greatly influences how Studio Anavami functions. I originally went to Daitokuji Zen temple complex in Kyoto to study Buddhist Art for a couple of months. Whenever I was sure it was time to leave I would find some new and enticing to study or unusual opportunity. While I was there I continued to practice several of the Zen arts including tea ceremony, calligraphy and sumi-e. I also lived in the countryside for several years as an apprentice in ceramics and I worked in a papermaking village, where I pounded kuzo fiber with a wooden mallet sitting in a river. In those days even for a foreigner the first six months of an apprenticeship you swept the floor and made tea, while learning how to pay attention. Paying attention, ends up being the heart of creative work.

There is a Japanese saying that you can get wetter in dense fog than plunging into a lake. Likewise I continue to access my experience from living in Japan in things that I never consciously studied. My large figurative paintings, as well as small encaustic pieces are influenced by my various studies, but more pervasive is the attitude about space, materials and what is called shugyo or practice. All of the traditional cultural arts as well as performance and martial arts in Japan are at their core a spiritual practice which is meant to engage the spirit of life.

My introduction to the Japanese cultural arts has been the counter point I needed to discover my relationship to the creative process. It continues to be an on-going investigation expressed in my own work and the workshops and retreats that I offer. Studio Anavami expresses a range of activities and events including, talks, book signings and collaborations with martial artists, dancers, astrologers, Qabbalist, healers as well as creative process circles, workshops and retreats in Italy and Ghost Ranch, New Mexico.

I have tried several different ways of working my studio space, but the carpet with no shoes works best. Somehow the constant interaction to the ground alters my relationship to my mind and body and the creative process. I am stretched out on the carpet now with the sun shining in the west door with an ocean breeze coming in the rollup door to the south. It may sound eccentric to have pristine carpet in a painting studio, but it creates sanctuary and I love it.

                                                        Majio                            

The Seven Principles of Leonardo da Vinci in Relation to the Emerging Cosmological Model as Applied to Creative Process

Burning Man 2013

As we move out of a global model and into the emerging cosmological model, it is clear that we are living in a learning Universe. It is a Universe which has no concern for how long it takes, and it is not afraid of making mistakes. Experimentation towards refinement and better solutions is the leading edge of all change. The more we live into this evolving story the more we are invited to engage our minds in new ways so that we can respond in new ways. I have found in facilitating creative process, that ENGAGEMENT is the key to developing new pathways of the mind, while at the same time disengaging from patterns of  response that keep us in the same loop. Like so many of the most important adventures of our lifetime, engagement has a wide spectrum of meaning from assuming an obligation for union, as in marriage, to coming into conflict, as in engaging in battle.  

The model of the Universe is outside of our established common sense. It is even outside of the reach of our intuition, until we have assembled essential information. We are called regularly to embrace dichotomy and seeming contradiction, as any physicist will tell you. Frequently the creative process is also an engagement in conflict with promise of unique integration, sometimes in the picture plane, often in the psyche. Even though in painting circle we are not making products and do not use qualitative analysis, participants are seeking some measure of success. The only benchmark that I can give them is engagement. Plain and simple, the degree to which you are engaged, is the degree of your success. Engagement here is being fully into the process. This is true even when the activity or results are not pleasing or comfortable. Yet if you are engaged through the process you will be led consistently to new discoveries and integration. This kind of creative involvement is practice for broader engagements that are being required of us in this age.

To begin to use our minds in new ways, we first need to see at how we are everyday being used by the mind. The mind, because its major function has been for our physical survival, is concerned with immediate safety and comfort, that is, it is fear-based. It is a cybernetic mechanism, designed to identify and solve problems, and does so at all times, in every way imaginable. It attempts to solve problems in our dreams, in our business proposals, in our personal lives. We need to recognize this natural process and ensure that it is appropriately focused on those issues, concerns, or creative processes that will yield the best benefit to the organism, we need to “consciously” engage. Quieting the mind is required for engagement in creative process, as well, as the various other intelligences, like emotional or ethical intelligence, that are eschewed by past trauma and contracted vision.

The mind, as it has developed, is constantly scanning in a relentless mental focus, habitually obscuring new possibilities. There are many models of men and women who have used their minds beyond their cultural bias, Leonardo da Vinci in particular embodied the seemingly polarity of art and science. In How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, The Seven Steps to Genius, Michael Gelb gives us a model in how to use our mind differently from our trained everyday thinking. Da Vinci was a master at whole-brain thinking. His principle of arte/scienza, engages left and right brain thinking in a complimentary way. He did not so as scientist AND artist but brought art into science and science into art. He also developed connessione, or system thinking, which on a public scale we are just beginning to understand. The recent science of ecology and family dynamics in psychology shows how long we have enjoyed the tidy compartmentalizing of the pieces, ignoring how each part is dependent on the whole. Both of these principles are essential in the creative process.

In Transformation Painting circles it takes practice to view the whole composition, and even longer to be able to hold it without judgment. With practice you begin to notice how the smallest mark changes the overall dynamic. It requires trusting the broader intelligence to respond without goals of comfort or instant gratification. It is obvious how our cultural training is imbalanced in the direction of analytical and rational framework, the critical voice has free range. This is not supportive to the early phases of creative process. It takes careful nurturance of the intuitive, whole systems and experimental thinking to exercise creativity. Although both kinds of thinking are necessary and prove effective when considered in painting circle dialogue, most of us are polarized in our perceptions and skill sets, when working alone.

The emerging cosmological mythology demands that art and science be intimately merged, which brings us to the da Vincian principle Sfumato, smoke or mist. Sfumato engages the uncertainty, paradox or ambiguity of life. It is important to know what is knowable and what is not. Just as we have to embrace so much mystery in the scientific model of the Universe, so we engage that mystery in the creative process. You cannot be sure what will arise out of a poem or painting because in the whole brain model you do not control it. If you engage Sfumato, the truth finds its way and it is often a surprise when it is revealed. To engage the process in a way that is open ended also reflects the evolutionary process of the Universe and supports pure science where the directive is curiosity, the next da Vincian principle. Curiositá, is a strong impetus in creative process. What happens if I put oil stick over acrylics or let the paint half dry and wipe it off? You don’t know until you try and the answer is subject to hundreds variables. Poets and philosophers have encouraged us to love the questions. Once again our enculturation determines the questions we are habitually asking Engaging the mind in a new way is to initiate a new kind of inquiry, which artists are constantly working with by opening themselves to journey through unchartered territory.

I will end with the most obvious engagement and that is sensazione, the senses, the way of using the intelligence of the whole person with corporaita, embodiment into an expansive and integrative consciousness. Awareness of the senses as a meditative approach to mindfulness calls forth engagement through presence. The last definition of engagement is to be drawn into and to “lock onto” the target. The mindfulness meditation training focuses on the sensations, which again engages the mind in ways that brings you to the ore of your being is so alien to our cultural values that we need workshops merely to introduce and practice it. Science has shown how unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can undermine emotional, physical and spiritual health. By the same token, mindfulness, through focus on the senses has been demonstrated to relieve stress and pain. Even though we are familiar with all of these principles, to engage them continually as a practice of the mind can have far reaching results on how we perceive and interact with the world, offering each of us a more robust and creative response to our lives, relationships and art.

                                                                                         Majio

Can We Change the Underlying Game, Fundamentally?... by Understanding How We Continually Truncating Our Options?

The game I am speaking of is the structure through which we perceive and thus conceive of ourselves and the world around us. If you were to distill down how you perceive the world into a paragraph, a sentence and then to a word, what would it be? I have found the word for me both surprising and sobering. I invite you to consider the question in a quiet moment, concluding with the word that best representing your present construct of your Universe.  

The word that best reflects my current, that is not daily, or weekly, but persistent world view is "polarity." I do not mean duality, contrast, or even dichotomy, but opposition in a way that stops possibility. As a visual artist, my orientation is creating, which I distinguish here from creativity. In creating, I speak of making something that was not there before you conceived of and created it. It could be a business, a meal, or the idea in a conversation. Creating is also different from problem solving. Although many problems arise in the creative process, overcoming them supports a greater vision and is not the goal in and of its self.

The structure of polarity does not invite creation because the two ends of the spectrum fight each other. In my studio life at last polarity is not an active dynamic, however in the rest of my life the conflict between negative and positive valence often truncates my options. The word valence is usually used in psychology in relation to emotions. In different cultures, eras, and even in relation to gender, the same emotion can considered negative or positive. That some emotions are better than others is a value judgment, an example of how our teaches us to think in polarities that is not necessarily there.

Karla McLaren in her book, The Art of Empathy, a Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill, talks about the how intense research on empathy is happening worldwide in more than a half dozen academic disciplines. Neuroscience is revolutionizing our thinking about feelings. There is more and more agreement that any emotion that comes up is valid, and emotions in and of themselves do not have a negative or positive valence. No emotion is invalid. How it feels and what you do with it, of course, is another question.

Emotions are indeed a natural response that causes damage only if repressed or acted out. Creating emotional polarity of good and bad lessens the opportunity for accurate perception, growth, healing and understanding. Emotions are a lucid example of how we are enculturated into polarity-based thinking which truncates our possibility of creative response. We have done the same thing when we pitch the masculine and feminine against each other. They are not opposites. They are compliments, for they inform each other. We have recently witnessed in our country the state of congressional dysfunction when the two political parties are polarized.

What is it exactly that attaches us to positions of right/wrong, good/bad? It is not principles of ethics,I believe, but identity. That is what we can or want to identify with over-rides our values. The more we react without reflection, the deeper the ruts of our polarities. We have all heard of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and survivor of Auschwitz. He had a first-hand experience of what one might call clear-cut polarity of right/wrong or good/bad  and yet he did not identify himself as victim. This is what he learned from that experience. 

Between a stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Let us consider identity in the realm of those in a culture who are creating with an identity which allows them to go beyond the rigid constructs of the norm. There have always been a few who were able to hold their identity loosely and expand what was thought infeasible. They have a curiosity and willingness to play and work which factors which cultural norm feel contradict each other.

There have always been a few who were able to hold their identity loosely and expand what was thought infeasible. Let us consider those in a culture who create with an identity which allows them to go beyond the rigid constructs of the norm. They have a curiosity and willingness to work with factors, which like Frankl, do not fall into the construct of polarity. 

Within inter-disciplinary research many old beliefs of creativity are being discarded. After 30 years of research and the publication of his now famous ‘flow’ theory, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has worked with ‘creatives’ including; Nobel Prize winners, Poets Laureates,  and well-known authors, composers and artist of all disciplines.  In his book Creativity, he interviewed one hundred creative people across a range of professional fields.  Contrary to popular myth, one of their common characteristics is a generalized equilibrium is the enjoyment of life with a constant willingness to expand the edges of what has gone before -- they are adept in the art of internal adaptation as life conditions change because they see more options than most of us. I know personally know how the roller coaster of doubt and elation in the studio can undermine or support the creative process.

Linda Graham in her book, Bouncing Back, Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being uses the latest research in neuroplasticity of the brain to prove that what we once thought was hard wired is not.  Here are just a few of the kind of awareness shifts that help you rewire your brain for resilience, well-being, and I would add, more possibilities for creating. In the book she offers exercises that help you to see different perspectives, create new options and discern choices, interrupt self-talk, and facilitate deeper brain integration as a way of reconditioning old identities.

Many of you have experienced life crisis and debilitating diseases, first hand or through loved ones, and have experienced the opportunity to step into a larger identity. Modern day cataclysmic disasters, as well as diseases of epidemic proportions are the vehicle of identity transformation. But, we do not have to wait until we or a loved one is stricken to expand our identity with greater understanding of the larger spectrum of life through which we are passing. It is a creative act to notice where you polarize, and consider how the dynamics of would totally change how you perceive the situation.