Creative Process: ARCHETYPES & SHAMANISM

STORE FRONT SHOW on  533 SEABRIGHT Ave. in SANTA CRUZ

Creative Process & SHAMANISM

Shaman, acrylic on canvas

The SHAMANIC impulse is experienced in our daily life, from praying, investing objects and places with power to many other kinds of creative activity which interact with the unseen world. The visual arts can offer connection to the essential parts of ourselves that want wholeness, integration and meaning beyond cultural norms and beliefs. We use storytelling and image-making to obtain guidance, information, and to update or re-negotiate our belief system. Just as animal figures in children’s stories and fairytales offer dialogue with the instinctual, TRANSFORMATIONAL PAINTING brings to consciousness the edge of awareness to challenge our growth.

 

These SHAMANISTIC paintings come from a world that is more real than everyday life because it reveals truth and creates meaning and understanding beyond the limits of the rational. Participating with the SHAMANIC archetype in the collective unconscious allows us to re-contextualize problems, trauma, and possibly societal madness. It deepens healing to remember that individual experiences of trauma simultaneously reflect the greater challenge resonating throughout the collective field. This kind of realization allows one to move beyond the moment of crisis by experiencing it in a greater context.

ARCHETYPE

All great myths and stories are about the ARCHETYPES and how they function. We experience ARCHETYPES in movies and novels. We experience them also in our own lives in conflicts, love and religious experiences, in fact, in all the experiences of our lives.

At the base of all existence are energy clusters of ARCHETYPES of innate character, energy and function arranged around Self... the central ARCHETYPE. Surrounding the Self in pairs of opposites are the other primary or basic archetypes of the Feminine, the Masculine, the Adversary, the Heroic, Death-Rebirth and the Journey.

An ARCHETYPE is an innate pattern within the psyche and within all life. We see the ARCHETYPES play themselves out, mostly automatically in our lives. 
In wars and conflicts there is an enemy and a victor. Male and female embody opposites to each other. People go through a developmental journey process all their lives yet also fall into crises, death-rebirths, and new directions. And at times of real clarity and growth we choose to integrate and transform our lives, as is the nature of the Self.

                 Strephon Kaplan Williams Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual

From Warrior to Magician

Magician, acrylic on canvas

In this painting, the MAGICIAN is reaching out for the tools of the trade, as the sword hangs suspended in air. The archetype of the Hero as Warrior is being spontaneous updated here and in the collective. Throughout history, medicine men, wizards, shaman, witch doctors, brujos, scientists, doctors, and inventors, have been connected to the archetypal pattern of the Magician.

Popular Culture is often on the edge of conscious change. The tradition of the mythical Warrior’s heroic journey is being challenged, as well as the paradigm which holds it in place. 

Whereas the Warrior uses physical strength and power-over, the MAGICIAN understands the mysteries of nature accessed by inner truth. You may have noticed how wizards, witches, inventors, scientists and shamans are appearing everywhere, in movies, video games and literature, with the stance of the Hero.

Unlike the Warrior, who struggles to overcome great challenges, the MAGICIAN believes in infinite potential and possibility. Rather than struggling against the current, she flows with it.

Fool of the West

Almost all cultures and traditions have a FOOL as jester, sacred clown, truth-teller, blundering innocent or trickster. The FOOL is seen as key to community’s survival both physically and spiritually. All indigenous tribes utilize the FOOL archetype to bring balance and perspective. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese cultures and royal courts in Europe utilized the FOOL’S participation to insert doubt, misgivings and possible challenge into what was considered off limits.

The FOOL is often an orphan, this one reminds me of the old red-haired cartoon character, Little Orphan Annie and her dog Sandy. Perhaps she expresses a FOOL who is asking for an update. In the comic strip her savior is Daddy Warbucks, the idealized capitalist who made his money in munitions. Annie as FOOL wanders vagabond-like through a corrupt world, fearless, generous, compassionate and optimistic.

The FOOL archetype in this painting is dressed as spirit of the West. If she is heading off a cliff, as the traditional Tarot FOOL is, it is into the Pacific Ocean, edge of the Western world. She reflects the health of the FOOL archetype as an American; innocent, lofty, yet often inflated. A Californian Fool, her hat symbolizes how her thinking takes precedent over the order the celestial bodies. Her cowering dog a figure of loyalty and instinct is imprinted with a squalid tenement building, as much of our resources are tied up in poverty. He is not the robust companion that we need. She carries a dowsing rod rather than the staff which infers connection to the unseen order and so aligns herself with the Magician. 

EMPRESS: Doorway Through Masculine Rule to Balanced Partnership  

  

EMPRESS/Queen is the archetype of the feminine in a position of power. In this painting she is the entrance into the liminal, the space in-between which we enter as we leave old ways of being behind which do not serve the collective, and yet have not found the new. 

There comes a time, when the one who has been in charge, the Emperor/King archetype must step aside to let a new force lead. The problems that have been created cannot be solved only with masculine energy only, but require feminine principles for a balanced perspective. 

The positive of the feminine in power is generative, creative and caring for community with sustainability. The EMPRESS is archetypally Earth Mother, the Anima, the Feminine Principle, Demeter, Kuan Yin and the Goddess of Fertility. She is ruled by Venus, the planet of love, creativity, fertility, art, harmony, beauty and grace. She reminds us that there is always enough, if we address the systems and policies of distribution.

TRANSFORMATIONAL PAINTING

I had no idea where these paintings might go even though each began with a theme; an approach which artists have used throughout time. The emphasis of TRANSFORMATION PAINTING is on the journey, not the destination, on the process rather than the product, because it is an engagement with the psyche, which brings forth information and personal realizations. TRANSFORMATION PAINTING has the potential for those involved in the creation or viewing to be transform.

This process feeds all creative activity, no experience in the arts is necessary. It is supportive to work in PAINTING CIRCLES, which are small and take place in a safe environment to build confidence and trust in one’s authentic self. Since it is not about the product, there is little technical instruction, allowing for a playful, meditative and experimental approach to create the journey that is needed at the time.

This kind of painting taps into the ARCHETYPAL REALMS and is fundamentally SHAMANISTIC, as is dream work. In neither case is there traditional reference or training involved because SHAMAN is used in the archetypal.

                                                                                       

The Arts as Education of the Archetypal Realms

Lover at the Edge, oil paint & mixed media on canvas  Majio 

In July and August the Painting Circles have been investigating the archetype of place through painting. It has been an interesting endeavor to view our everyday surroundings in an archetypal context.  We have experienced how physical place overlaps with emotional, historical and mythological place, similar to nighttime dreams when a character is father, boyfriend and serial killer, all at the same time.

In the realm of the psyche, unconscious archetypal aspects of place merge to shape the container

of the rich and complex world we create in our lives. In the Painting Circles we use process painting to make conscious dominant archetypal pattern in our personal mythology. All of the arts, however, lead us into a deeper experience of our interior world. This stretching of our personal connection to archetype as soul tending, has called to our attention the works of Thomas Moore.

Thomas Moore in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life, talks about how care of the soul requires education in the archetypal realms. He says that we learn from art what earth-centered cultures have traditional acquired through “ritual, story, sacrament, sacrifice, icon, temple, sculpture, and 

dance.” Probably, like you, I have had to invent ritual with sacrifice in the desire for sacraments, not available in my community. The arts nurture, guide, support and inform us of the mysteries of life, allowing us to enlarge our immediate cultural context; revealing to us our soul life.

Moore compares psychology to allopathic medicines, which numb our pain instead of intensifying the exploration of mythic process. The arts provide a viewpoint fundamentally different from the one that shapes most modern psychology; as through the artistic imagination we are liberated more by entering into our experiences than by being led out of them.  It can be deeply moving or sometimes profoundly disturbing. Unlike modern allopathic therapies, which tend to numb us to the pain of our predicaments, the arts sharpen the emotions and intensify the crisis of meaning; for me the arts have always been an engagement of the psyche, it was new to think of them as an education.

I feel that recently I have witnessed an inordinate amount of calamity in my P: a close friend is recovering from emergency cancer surgery, another’s kitchen floor has been torn up because of structural water damage, a painter was notified that the inheritance she planned for retirement does not exist and my mother in her mid-eighties fell and broke her hip.

UCSC Organic Farm

I contemplated my mother’s fall as an ax stroke through her life, not only for her every day routine, but a cut to the quick of her being. In her term of rehabilitation for her hip replacement she felt humiliated, ignored and diminished. For someone who with abundant humor and trust in her connection to other human beings, she was shaken to the core. I began to frame these catastrophes as a severance of well-being, like a visceral ax swing From the many years splitting huge quantities of wood for a wood burning kiln, I can easily recall that ax swing in my body. I felt it every time I heard a siren, projecting that someone’s life was coming apart. Intellectually I knew there was a more expansive way of viewing this but it felt like a wrenching betrayal, a severing of wholeness and well-being each time. I yearned for an experiential example of the instinctual or soul education of which Moore speaks.

An example did come to me and through a poem that I had read many times before. But this time I heard it in a new way. In Billy Collins’ poem, Splitting Wood, in the last few stanzas he uses the metaphor of the two halves of a split log wobbling in place like two naked lovers exposed to the light. I had that experience recently also; the shock of being pulled from deep intimacy into separation. What also comes to mind is my daughter’s birth, both were a severance, but they sponsored something grander, just as splitting of the wood to fire the kiln transforms the fragile clay into durable ceramics. It was an experience that went directly to my psyche. It did not go through my brain until later when I looked at the current tragedies and could see them as part of a greater cycle of life.

It was graphic how art, in this case poetry, takes the understanding of the mysteries of life through the archetypal realm of the psyche inviting a deeper grasp of birth in death. Through exposure to the archetypes that shape our lives and seize our emotions, the arts contribute powerfully to the enchantment of everyday life. We live in a culture dominated by logical and quantitative analysis, one that has forgotten the many alternative means of dealing with experience---ritual, storytelling, community participation in grieving and celebrating artistry in everyday tasks, and personal poetry of life. The arts speak to our instinctual imagination, in a sense to our primitive natures, and so attend the archetypal dimension of our thoughts and emotions.  Majio                                                      

                                                                                         

Last stanzas of Billy Collin’s Poem,      Splitting Wood I want to say there is nothing like the sudden opening of wood, but it is like so many other things— the stroke of the ax like lightning, the bisection so perfect the halves fall away from each other as in a mirror and hit the soft ground like twins shot through the heart. And rarely, if the wood accepts the blade without conditions, the two pieces keep their balance

in spite of the blow, remain stunned on the block as if they cannot believe their division, their sudden separateness. Still upright, still together, they wobble slightly as two lovers, once as two lovers, once secretly bound, might stand revealed, more naked than ever, the darkness inside the tree they shared now instantly exposed to the blunt light of this clear November day, all the inner twisting of the grain that held them blindly in their augmentation and contortion now rushed into this brightness as if by a shutter that, once opened, can never be closed.

Musings on Relationship to Place

Even though place is fundamental to everything in our daily life, our collective and personal mythologies around place are often unconscious. First step is to get in touch with our values is to notice our decisions. A former UCSC student told me the price to ‘stay on’ in Santa Cruz after graduation was in the arena self-image. For her, it meant buying clothes from the Thrift Store instead of Banana Republic. “Keep Santa Cruz Weird,” as a motto gives a certain kind of permission.

How do you define place? Is it connected to experience in the past or a vision of the future? Is it rated on usefulness at the time? Is it geological, historical or emotionally tied to stories of personal mythology? What is the charge of the place you are living in now? How does it reflect your inner life? Is this place a stop-over or is it the container for a life? Does it challenge your daily values?

Traditional Japanese wisdom says that you don’t choose place, it chooses you. Many people that I have talked to in Taos, New Mexico would agree, as they each have a story of how they were chosen.  What does it mean to be chosen by place? Is there something specific that you need to do in that place? When place is done with d you do you have to move on? Can one be between places or in no place? What is the difference between place, land and landscape for you?

Lucy Lippard, art critic, curator and author, distinguishes between the intimacy of a lived-in landscape, which becomes place, and landscape seen from a single static point of view. She calls the latter a set of surfaces, a backdrop in the viewing. This is interesting in that the genre of landscape painting fits this definition quite literally. So often landscape paintings feels like a scene devoid of content, intimacy, without a component of heart or time. Although landscape, still life and nude models are used as an exercise in learning about space, color and technique of the materials, it has often served underlying themes of ownership and/or objectification.

Not only does this view of place call into question our fundamental relationship to nature, but also our relationship to our selves and each other. Art history demonstrates social trends of attitudes toward women through representation of the female figure, as it at the same time depicts the desire to conquer or romanticize the earth. Indigenous cultures, traditionally integrated with nature, create their mythology from the land. Group cohesion, coherence and sustainability are directly connected to their relationship to the land. Our depiction of the land often demonstrates alienation, expressing materialistic and sentimental values.

Karl Marx in Kapital, talks about labor being the mediator between nature and culture, “countryside” forms a barrier between “civilization” and “wilderness.” Mircea Eliade maintains that the “sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness, not a stage in the history of consciousness.” The archetypal forms and patterns of the human psyche then are mirrored in the world of nature and how we perceive it. For me that resonance is the sacred organizing principle of life.

The idea of that where humans meet nature is a buffer zone, suggests that landscape is where what we control meets what we want to control, which underscores the ‘not belongingness’ that we have created. The liminal is that space in-between, a place of transition and transformation. It can be confused with the marginal, which is the projections and shadows that we don’t own, but see in others. Examples of the marginalized are criminals, homeless, insane, handicapped, aged or anyone viewed as not-me. The liminal is the edge that is evolving, sometimes over laps with the marginal.

How does this relate to your relationship to place? Most of the places we interact with daily have been designed for the expediency and profit of business. Perhaps that is why the current interest in feng shui,the Chinese brand of geomancy. We are desperate to be actively involved with where we live, if not in the design of place, then the energetics. This may also explain widespread interest to indigenous ritual, healing and world view's which find personal meaning in nature.

Visual artist, musicians and performers are exploring relationship to nature, place, and each other in more innovative and creative ways with interdisciplinary and multimedia which invite participation. Those in the arts have been interested for a long time in the question of relationship to place? People in general are looking for new perspectives on daily life which includes a healthy function of the cultural arts. Touring Europe as an extension of Disneyland is no longer satisfying.  People want a different relationship to things and places which demands new ways of perceiving the world.

How we perceive ourselves in our place of being has tremendous room for creativity. Just as each of us is being called to become aware of the myths that sponsor our lives, we are also being called to create, as artist, our relationship to the world we live in. Begin with your awareness as to what place means to you and how it expresses your values.

Suzie Gablik writes, “a central aspect of new paradigm thinking involves a significant shift from objects to relationships… the emerging new paradigm reflects a will to participate socially… There is the aesthetic perspective orienting us to the making of objects, the ecological perspective connects art to its integrative role in the larger whole and the web of relationships in which art exists. A new emphasis falls on community and the environment rather than on individual achievement and accomplishment…”

Most of the neuroses and the vacuum of meaning from which we suffer result from an isolation of the ego-mind from the archetypal unconscious according to Carl Jung. Art as meaning making is a collective involvement in a cultural activity which nurtures, sustains and renews a society, involving everyone. Our immediate challenge is to reveal the sacredness within our everyday lives, to maintain connection to and care of soul.               Majio

DREAMING into the LAND, 5 Day Residency, Questa, New Mexico June 21-25 2011

Great Spirit of the East, Place of the rising Sun, Who counts the years of our lives! and the opportunities of each day. Strengthen us that we may not neglect our gifts, nor the hopes of each day and the hopes of each year.

Great Spirit of the South, whose warm breath of compassion melts the ice that gathers round our hearts, whose fragrance speaks of warm days, kindle our love into growth of true and living realities. Teach us that who is truly strong is also kind, wise, tempers justice with mercy, courage with compassion. 


Great Spirit of the West, the land of the setting Sun, with Your soaring mountains and free, wide rolling prairies, bless us with knowledge of the peace which follows effort of striving and the freedom which emits like a flowing robe in the winds of a well-lived life. Teach us that the end is better than the beginning and that the setting sun is glorious and our lives not lived in vain.

 Great Spirit of the North, who brings wisdom with age and time Bringing the waters of the air Who covers the Earth with a sparkling crystal above whose deep tranquility every sound is beautiful. Temper us with strength to withstand the biting blizzards yet make us thankful for the beauty which follows and lies deep over the warm Earth in its wake.




 
Great Spirit of the heaven, above, in the days infinite light and amid the countless stars of the night remind us that you are vast that you are beautiful and majestic beyond all of our knowing or understanding but also that you are no further from us than the tilting upwards of our heads and the raising of our eyes.

 Great Spirit of Mother Earth beneath our feet Master of metals, Germinator of seeds and the Storer of the Earth's resources, help us to give thanks Always for Your present bounty.









Great Spirit of our souls within, burning in our heart's desire and in our innermost aspirations, speak to us now and always so that we may be aware of our greatness and goodness of spirit, This gift of life and be worthy of happiness Our priceless privilege of living.











Innvocation of Seven Sacred Directions