OPENING WITH ONE PAIR or CROSSING THE STREAMS…

Hello!

Thanks for checking out this inaugural post of ART, PRACTICE, &.

I’m beginning this blog to share thoughts about my personal journey of art making and spiritual exploration.

For readers who are not friends and family, here’s a wee bit about me:  

Professionally, I have enjoyed a 40 year career working as a designer and scenic artist for theater, film, and network television. I spent twenty of those years living and working in NYC.

Personally, I have been making art, music, and theater, writing, and exploring Eastern spiritual practices since my early teens.

Currently, I reside amidst the tall trees of the Pacific Northwest, where I continue to follow my creative pursuits, and teach and design, as opportunities present themselves.

Spiritually, I identify as Hindu and I’m a Pastor Spouse to a truly wonderful woman who is a United Methodist Minister.

Oh, and we have a really, really old black cat named Coyote…

And what about that weird title up there, ART, PRACTICE, &? Well, though I’m starting this blog primarily to write about connecting my art making and my spiritual practice, I’m sure I’ll meander down other paths as well. I tend to lean toward quirky thought, extravagant punctuation, and I’ve always liked ampersands… and e. e. cummings…

Now, down to the business at hand!

Stream One:

Making art is what I’ve been pulled to do ever since I was a youngster. Crayons in kindergarten and grade school, coloring books, drawing spaceships and the planets; I did the usual stuff. I had an older sister who did art with crayons too, only she melted them over a candle and made colorful drippy Pollocks on pieces of wood. I was fascinated!

In junior high, I graduated to colored pencils and drawing mod designs, peace signs, strutting heroes, and otherworldly landscapes emulating my favorite sci-fi paperback and album covers.

Peter Max, Rodger Dean, Frank Frazetta. Conan. Yes and Cream.

Then:

I spent one particularly sunny summer afternoon at the county library, squatting between the stacks, leafing curiously through a book on modern art. Its pages were filled with literally stunning images of Braques, Klines, Rothkos, and the like. I was agog with wonder! This was a new world! And in that book, on that day, I discovered a Motherwell reproduction that spoke right to the core of my young self in a language which I clearly perceived, but couldn’t at all comprehend.

It scared me a little bit and mystified me a lot. It stuck with me. It got to me. It stirred something.

I now count that moment as my third ever spiritual experience…

Standing with Elegy to the Spanish Republic – Robert Motherwell – 1958-1960 – Philadelphia Museum of Art

Stream Two:

Along about that same time, I chanced to purchase a book on Eastern thought and practice from the remainder bin at the local Kmart.

Now, my mother was a Polish Catholic converted to Protestantism, and my Dad was a baptized-in-the-creek Kentucky Christian. They took me along to church when I was a kid in elementary school, but didn’t make any particular effort pass their faith on to me. I was never baptized into a Christian church, and I didn’t turn that way when, in my adolescence, I began to feel the beginnings of a spiritual void. It was the early 70’s and there were influences of all kinds around me. I had a brother-in-law I idolized who practiced transcendental meditation, my high school art teacher was an Eckankar devotee, and, of course, there were the Beatles, Pandit Ravi Shankar, and protesting the war in Asia.

I was a stripling hippy wrapped in incense and Indian-print bedspreads. Eastern philosophy? I was in!

No surprises there.

Crossing The Streams:

By the end of high school, the thought of trying to feed myself by making pure art was just too daunting. I had been designing and building and painting stage sets all through high school and loved it. I reasoned that I might just be able to make a career out of that. (Only marginally more realistic, right?)

Luckily, it worked out. I studied Art and Theater in college, learned to render, kept making art for myself and began to hear – and learned to heed – the hum of an inner voice guiding my creative endeavors.

It took me years to realize that the inner voice I learned to listen to when making art sounded just like the inner voice I heard when meditating….

It took me more years, and the encouragement of my partner, to begin to understand the non-duality,

…Atman is Brahman…

and to understand that, for me, freeing my creative self IS spiritual practice. The more I’ve merged those two streams in my life, the more clarity, purpose, direction, and joy I’ve experienced.

I was doing it before I knew it. I want to celebrate that I’m beginning to know it now.