Talbot Transfer method

Day 5: River Rock Studio – Painting in Words

Composition is like a pasta dinner, our instructor, Jonathan Talbot, tells us. If you list the ingredients from least interesting flavour to most interesting, you find that the more interesting the flavour, the less of it you need to use.

We eat our art, he says, and proceeds to enthrall us with one of his many stories of art-making and life and a series of paintings under the name Patrin (‘patron’). It is a Romani word representing the signs travellers leave for each other. Here is a welcoming place. Don’t go to that door. They have good cheese. This vendor cheats… As a teenager, Jonathan lived rough for a while and was taken in by a Romani family in the States. He is a beautiful story-teller and his story is one of family, loyalty, bonds of gratitude that pay homage to a people who treated him kindly and set him well on the road of life at a time when he was lost.

In a field of white sheep, a black sheep is more interesting, he finishes off his story-telling and I am reminded of the analogy I used years ago when teaching creativity to grade schoolers. The cat sat on the mat does not paint a very interesting story. But, when I say, the cat sat on the dog’s mat, what happens? And the students would get all excited about the possibilities of what could happen if…

Collage-making is an exploration of ‘what could happen if…’ If I put this image next to this, if I layer this on that, if I juxtapose this thought with this idea…. what could happen?

Like life, the outcome is seldom predictable, often uncontrollable. We must stay unattached to the outcome to give ourselves the freedom to explore the context of the elements and aspects of where we’re at to find ourselves free of expectations that the journey will be anything other than….. fascinating!

Benjamin Zander, co-author with his wife Rosamund Stone Zander, of “The Art of Possibility” shares his response when life throws curve balls or he takes a left instead of the right he’d planned. Rather than judging himself, or calling himself a loser, or stupid, he throws both arms up above his head, puts a huge grin on his face and exclaims, “How fascinating!”

I make many mistakes working in a medium I’m not familiar with, learning new techniques. When I choose to judge them as ‘mistakes’, I limit my capacity to push through what is happening into that mystical place of all that is possible when I let go and fall into wonder, awe, Love.

How fascinating!

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Painting In Words

Lost in a sea of colours and shape
painting in words
poetry pouring down
from cerulean skies
burnished with umber and quinachrodone gold
floating on a sea of Pyrrole Orange
I forget that place where right and wrong
matter as I attempt to hold on
to a design I cannot let go of.
Lost in the deceit
of believing letting go
will kill my dreams
of creating under water.

Diving into the nothing
that is left
when I let go
I fall
effortlessly
into the divine essence
of life
flowing in all directions
immersing me
in its wonder.

Letting go
I fall
free
of holding on
to nothing
but everything
I am
when I
let go.

: Playing with Composition

: All that is Left is Right

: What the deer saw

: Isadora

Day 3: River Rock Studio — On the way to finding the path, I found my way.

We painted until midnight. Four adults revelling in the joy of discovery, initiation, anticipation of what happens when we let go of judgement to fall into that place where all we know is what is right before us in the presence of the present of now.

We laughed. Teased. Shared stories. Of art. Art-making. Art-treasuring. We shared ideas. Scraps of paper, “here try this piece there.” “Does anyone have any Green Gold?”

We shared ideas, thoughts, experiments that worked and one’s that didn’t.

We painted medium over magazine pages and set them to dry. We ironed on and peeled back. We worked alone and together. Separately and as one.

And through it all, the muse entwined us in her seductive call to let go, become, allow.

“It’s not only having the information that counts,” Jonathan had told us earlier in the day. “It’s knowing how to share it.”

With yourself. The canvas. One another. The world.

“Art is a visual language,” Jonathan said. “the more we play with it, the more comfortable we become with the elements.”

I am stuck. My piece is not working.

I am attached to the elements, the composition, the path I’ve chosen.

Jonathan sits on the other side of my work table. “Take the elements off the substrate,” he says. “All of them.”

I take them off.

“You have 3 minutes to rearrange them,” he says. “Make a new composition.” And looks at his watch, timing me.

I rearrange the pieces of my collage.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“It’s okay,” I tell him.

“Do it again,” he says.

And I do. Again and again, each time working to place the elements without thought, without attachment.

“None of it is permanent. None of it,” he says when I have arranged the elements into a final pose.

And in the reconstruction of the composition, I discover harmony in other ways.

There is no one right way to discover the path. There is only the path I take and always, there are many paths to find myself.

I had arisen early to sit outside in the morning light. In silence, I sat and heard the birdsong, the leaves rustling. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a coyote yip, an owl hoot. Somewhere in the distance, there were many things I could not hear. Voices talking. Laughing. Calling to one another, rising to greet the day. Cars passing over asphalt, a bird landing on the still surface of a pond, rippling it for a moment as it touched down.

I knew all these things were happening, somewhere in the distance, and still I sat. Alone. Quiet. At peace in the early morning light.

Another day of wonder and awe awaits. Another day unfolds in the joy of creating without any intention other than to learn and express and experience the gifts the muse has to share.

My poem, Falling Away, is about the journey to find the path. You can read it HERE.