The Story Behind The Art Process
Connecting the dots…
The gift of criticism and how it helped me develop The Art Process Method.
Growing up with an artist mother was both inspiring and a little soul destroying. My mother was a self taught extremely talented artist. She was definitely ahead of her time in terms of her subject matter, more perhaps in line with Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of bones and flowers. My mother painted dead things: dried flowers; dead fish; old human bones and destroyed buildings. I only understood later that she was a very depressed, unfulfilled woman. She never felt like she pursued her dreams (whatever they may have been). Along with her deep unhappiness was a relentless judgmental attitude towards any other art made by me or anyone else. The result being that I could never call myself an artist. The only thing that I knew in my (alive) bones, was that when I was in the quiet of my own bedroom, drawing (live) plants, I felt at peace. I mostly did not show her my artwork. I knew how she would have reacted.
Despite this severe lack of confidence, and with her help, I decided to attend art school In Cape Town. What gave me the strength to do that, I have no idea! Perhaps it was just in my bones…My professors managed to do the same thing that my mother did: tearing apart my work as being irrelevant until tears rolled down my cheeks and I ran out of there wondering why I had put myself in that vulnerable position. I had allowed them to open up old wounds that had never even begun to see the light of day, let alone be processed.
I left art school determined to be a different kind of teacher. I had zero confidence in my ability to create art of any value.
I began teaching in various institutions: from preschools to high schools to art schools. I knew that I was a gifted teacher!
I learned early on that there were so many ways that I could bring the creative spark out in my students and it had nothing to do with the productive output. It had all to do with going deep into the judgments that swirl around in our heads when creating: the comparing mind. I slowly developed a practice that allowed for a beautiful emergence of art from being in the moment by moment process of creative flow. Allowing whatever wants to emerge come through in a non judgmental way.
That propelled me to develop The Art Process method and open up my own teaching studio with that same name. My goal was to provide the safest place to explore and delve into creative experience for ANYONE regardless of their experience. My view of success was how much joy and peace pervaded the studio. It was a truly creative fountain…
I delved deeper and deeper into this idea. It turns out that I had not invented this idea, though I did refine it in a coaching sense. Why was this so much more fulfilling? I did some research and this is what I found in wikipedia:
“Process art is an artistic movement where the end product …., is not the principal focus; the process of its making is one of the most relevant aspects if not the most important one: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, patterning, and moreover the initiation of actions and proceedings. Process artists saw art as pure human expression…..Process art has been entitled as a creative movement in the US and Europe in the mid-1960s. It has roots in Performance Art, the Dada movement and, more traditionally, the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, and in its employment of serendipity. Change and transience are marked themes in the process art movement.
This gave me so much more insight into this field of expressive therapies in which the act of making art in this way, can give you so many insights into your own life. That is why I encourage my students to stand back from their work, and see what it is revealing. Those revelations are astounding.
EXPLORE HOW THE ART PROCESS CAN WORK FOR YOU!