Very recently I had one of those dreams, the
kind that supplies no contextual hook to bring it back into the waking world.
It felt significant to my recent paintings, but I was left with only the feeble
trace of the experience. In the dream, I was pulling a gold metallic substance,
oddly similar to a soil tiller, over a canvas-like surface.
When writing down these fragments I got that
AHA body-hit that the gold substance was liminal space. Then came the
realization which connected, not only the title of the show at Apricity Gallery
in June, A Ruby and a Single Nail…, but also the image I chose for the
postcard from a Japanese Noh drama, Komachi no Sotoba. I realized through the
dream, that poem and the gold paintings were connected through the experience
of the LIMINAL.
Liminal is a word that is being used more
frequently these days. I first came across it when trying to translate
the word, tsuki ma, from Japanese into English, which means the space
between things. Liminal, from the Latin limen, means threshold or the
place between here and there. It is the marker where one place or state ends
and another one begins.
The liminal is the archetypal state of
transition, a conduit between conditions or circumstances, between worlds.
People usually pass through the liminal in times of transition and/or
initiation. There are, however, fragments of marginalized populations who live
in the liminal, as the homeless, insane, exiled, criminal, handicapped,
adolescents, visionaries and often artists.
The word threshold referred
originally to the place where grain was threshed or beaten in order to release
its essence, its life. True ritual uses the concept of threshold to mark the
stripping away of old identity, in order to make way for the new. Threshold, in
relation to the liminal, is also the place where stimulus produces a response,
as in a pain threshold. Sometimes it takes spending time in no-man’s-land for the
new ground to be realized.
The screen painting of Komachi no
Sotoba is the story of a 9th century courtesan of stunning beauty; a renown poet who lives her old
age in homeless poverty and madness on the edge of Kyoto, Japan. Komachi,
sitting on a fallen Buddhist stupa raises the ire of passing Buddhist monks on
their way to the capitol. They admonish her for
her disrespect. As they enter into a dialogue quoting Buddhist sutras and Zen
poets. It becomes clear to them that they have the trappings of the liminal,
but she lives it. They end by bowing to her, realizing her understanding of The
Way far exceeds their own.
Transformational
Painting is designed at STUDIO ANAVAMI to cultivate the liminal, to paint
there, and to be irrevocably changed by the experience.
-Majio
My experience of Transformational
Painting is primarily in the realm of being rather than cognition and the
naming of things. It calls forth intuition. It cultivates
spontaneous presence. The seer and the seen become interchangeable within the
conscious participation in the moment of creation. In allowing rather
than manipulating, I have an opportunity to realize what is arising as
inseparable within the experience itself. My mind is no longer grasping,
rather it is receiving the images as they arise from realms which open
themselves to this experience. Being one with this felt sense of painting
allows the images and their meanings to reveal themselves.
Opening to the
raw immediacy of this direct experience with conscious intention, the many facets,
realms, and levels of this moment become more open, more accessible.
There is a feeling that the dynamic flow itself is conjuring the paint, color,
form, and texture to arrange itself into a image which seems to magically arise
before our very eyes.
-Rachel Van Dessel
Transformational
Painting for me is a journey with no destination. It is a discovery of self on
many levels with my soul peeking out and speaking through the creative painting
process.
Painting is a
tool for me to find balance in my life. I observe my painting and look for that
balance. By balance I mean staying on an even keel, centered no matter what
outside events happen….order or chaos….beauty or ugliness. If I choose
tenderness for myself and others it will extend outward like ripples in the
water from a tossed stone. My heart will hear the sacred sounds of all life and
I will paint it.
-Lorrie Bogner
