"In The Flow" how intuition TOOK ME ON A NEW PATH
This painting is called, The Way of Water. It's filled with flowy, serene hues of blue. After I finished it, I hung it in my home near the front entrance for several years. When I met the person who fell in love with it, I found a way for him to buy it and we shipped it to his home in Costa Rica from New York.
Can you feel those abstracted moments of calm? The temporary bits of calm in between huge swells of rough and scary moments. That fits my client and the life he built so well. He helps people face their deepest fears and brings them into a calm port at the end of the day.
When I was a young adult, I looked for ways to be in the world other than just making art. Mostly I was terrified of embracing the starving artist mantra if I were to truly live an artist's life and be another starving artist. However, in a hyper-energized search for some other way to live, I sold everything I owned, bought a 1-way ticket, moved to Alaska, and enrolled in the University of Alaska.
Was I following the Flow back then?
In any case, all these years later mathematics, rocks, minerals and landscapes permeate all aspects of my life. So it shouldn't surprise anyone, me included, when landscapes and waveforms appear in my abstracts.
(for more discussion, scroll to the bottom of page...)
Can you feel those abstracted moments of calm? The temporary bits of calm in between huge swells of rough and scary moments. That fits my client and the life he built so well. He helps people face their deepest fears and brings them into a calm port at the end of the day.
When I was a young adult, I looked for ways to be in the world other than just making art. Mostly I was terrified of embracing the starving artist mantra if I were to truly live an artist's life and be another starving artist. However, in a hyper-energized search for some other way to live, I sold everything I owned, bought a 1-way ticket, moved to Alaska, and enrolled in the University of Alaska.
Was I following the Flow back then?
In any case, all these years later mathematics, rocks, minerals and landscapes permeate all aspects of my life. So it shouldn't surprise anyone, me included, when landscapes and waveforms appear in my abstracts.
(for more discussion, scroll to the bottom of page...)
-- SOLD -- "The Way Of Water" 60x48-in acrylic on aluminum
"Coast" 20x20-in acrylic on board
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"Southern Sunset", 24x18-in, acrylic on board
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--SOLD-- "Shifting Rainbow"
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--SOLD--"Sunrise Canyon" 48x36-in acrylic on aluminum
|
"Blue Peak", 36 x 24-in, acrylic on board
|
--SOLD-- Silver and Blue, 30 x 18-inches, acrylic on board
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(From the top ...So it shouldn't be too surprising when landscapes and waveforms appear in my abstracts.)
During the year leading up to this series, I continually woke up between 2 and 3 am and had a distinct urge to pull up YouTube. In those dreamy nights, I stumbled on flow acrylic methods crafters used to make fast art and cool looking table tops. I had witching hour inspirational nights before, so I just went with it. In the quiet of the night I opened YouTube and watched videos appear one at a time that described very odd and new type of painting materials.
My first impression of these videos was that of a weird merger of an art show and a baking demo. They used spatulas, wooden panels, wire cookie cooling racks, and plastic cups filled with layers of liquid paint. In the end, I received a well organized list of flow art materials and techniques on how to calculate percentages of medium-to-pigment.
The next phase was a relentless demand to assemble a new studio setup designed for flow paintings. When I had all the materials and I practiced on small panels, I developed a distinctive technique and refer to it as the Intentional Flow method.
I worked with this method day and night, I experienced a sort of out-of-body quality of life, which it lasted over six months. During that time, the new method was ingrained and reproducible. While the new flow techniques were assembling in my subconscious, I did not pause to analyze or question what was happening—I simply gave myself over to my muse and followed my intuition. If a technical problem showed up, an answer appeared by morning. It was a sublimely serene time, even though I was energized and excited as I worked around the clock creating this new series.
While embracing this style of totally intuitive trance-like of creativity, I stepped into the intuitive flow while fully present, relaxed my will, and let go. No preconceived ideas. No plans. Just magical results.
After I completed a dozen new paintings worthy of hanging in a gallery, I could tell how my inspiration-fueled studio experience had a common theme to my journey from disabling illness back to health. Once that connection clicked, I saw how my previous series, Ethereal, the paintings identified by gashes, scapes, and cuts, had documented a long period of major, life-stopping, excruciating pain.
________________
The inside spiritual story of working in The Flow
When painting the "In the Flow" series, I focussed on relaxing into The Flow. At first it was uncomfortable and a bit like work, like when you first start to meditate. Eventually, you understand the more you relax, the better it is. I find it quite funny in a synchronistic way, that the paint media I use to paint this series is called flow acrylics.
The Universe is sometimes funny like that. It has a sense of humor. Actually, it's a bit corny and on the nose quite often. For instance, my formal training is as a research geophysicist. I worked on original research ideas. My goal was to use highly mathematical and statistical processes on data teased out of minerals or rocks to find differences, anomalies, or just repeating patterns which told me something about the underlying structure of my area of focus. It could be the paleomagnetic signatures of rocks, grand or micro-layers of sediments, or even crystalline phase structures I created in the lab.
I took that science research skill set and moved into Silicon Valley work life as a technical writer. I sat alongside software architects and the rest of the software engineering team to suss out patterns in what they created. I distill those results into human readable documents mostly for other engineers. Now onto the juicy spiritual stuff.
Several years ago, during a ceremony, my guides urged me to step back from analytical thinking and be more present. They started by asking me to stop counting things, a habit of mine, I'd count dots, lines, repeating patterns in tiles, seconds to initiate, minutes to boil, meters in blocks, miles on trips, girth of any object, and height of plants. A voice interrupted my count-down at the start of a plant ceremony where I was calculating passing time while waiting for the experience to start. Basically, I was clocking how long it took for me to see patterns and hear advice.
Suddenly I heard "Stop counting." Just a direction. No energy behind it. "Ooh. That's my favorite pass-time," was my first thought. My second thought was, "OK. I'll stop." Fast forward to the end of the week (I was at the Rythmia medical spa) after a lot of amazing information came down of what I wasn't sure what to do with. It was not the usual stuff. I saw my guides party hard on a stage with hanging lights built right on my abdomen. They were celebrating enhanced communication with me. They told me how my spirit was in a golden egg which they pushed into my newborn baby body. The next night they gave me a second one, sort of an upgrade egg. During the early part of the last night, I talked with my dad about his war time killings (he made me come up with a forgiveness ceremony so he could be guilt-free when he greeted my 90 year old mother when she passed), whereas on the first night Mother Ayahuasca drummed with my thigh bones for what seemed like hours, to show me I was "renting" this body and I better take care of it and remember where it came from.
At the end of the of that first visit to Rythmia, during the last night in ceremony, Mother and the Universe teamed up to deliver this final message, "Stop trying to figure us out." True; I know we can't really do it, even with complicated maths and particle accelerators because we exist here in this 3-D limited, earth-born, human bodies. At the last ceremony serving, I couldn't stomach one more ounce. I immediately threw it straight up and went into cyclical vomiting. After I recovered from the spectacle of puking on the altar, I figured there was nothing left to power a journey. I crawled back to my bed and laid down attempting to go into a deep, meaningful meditation. Instead, I was suddenly spun out into infinity and kept spinning. I spun so fast, I didn't know what or where I was. After an eternity of jumbled disarray, I landed somewhere... a beach or a room, I don't recall, but I do remember a question. "Do you know where you are? Do you know what happened?" My analytic brain jumped into action and I regurgitated fragments of a unified theory of multidimensional quark stuff and heard back, "WRONG!" Immediately I was back out in the infinite, spinning endlessly in a timeless void. I landed and answered the same two questions, the same way over and over and over again, in between the void tumbler sessions. It went on like that until I could just barely hang onto the tiniest thread of memory . Just a shadow, an echo of thinking I do know but really I don't know. I can't really know. When I finally answered, "I don't know anything," they quipped "right," and left me alone to lay still on my back, exhausted and nauseous.
That's not the funny part. The funny part came four and a half years later when I was back at Rythmia. During those four years, I had stopped counting things or checking for updates on unification theories. I was about to but then didn't buy a copy of my favorite theory which was a published book, "My Big TOE" (TOE meaning the theory of everything). To get to the funny part, we're going to see what happened during my second visit to Rythmia on my second night of my stay. By that time I was accustomed to not searching for answers to the big question, I didn't recognize that I've actually changed a little. I had a different intention for this trip. This time I checked in because I was literally unable to be around mean people for extended periods of time. I would lose my nerve and get weepy. I would walk away and physically hide. You can't live like this especially, if one of the mean people in your life is your manager. My intention was to understand or fix the protector part of me that had apparently melted away.
On the second ceremony night, my guides were back and this time they didn't come to party or give me gifts. This time I was asked a serious question. Would I accept them to merge with my soul? I said yes. My consent initiated a phenomenal experience. I can't describe it for you because it was multi-dimensional in an altered space without time. I remember lots of symbolic movements on my part and a few moments where I became very scared and asked to stop. They paused each time and reminded me I had agreed. Sometimes, I saw my husband (who was was back at home in New York) looking at me from far down a tunnel. We locked eyes. I could feel his strength, love and encouragement to come forward into the swirling mesh.
After it was all over and done, I sat back against the building 's damp outer wall with my hair down and a small red scrunchie in my hand. The air was dank and dark. The sky was covered with thick clouds, so the moon and stars were hidden. I didn't know what to do with it and I didn't want to lose it, but they told me to keep my hair down at the end. During the sweeping ceremonial movements, my glasses had fallen off and I didn't know where they were. I was disoriented to say the least.
I asked, "What should I do with my scrunchie? I don't want to lose it. I still have more plant medicine nights and I need it."
"Put it on your big toe," came the reply.
I was scooted forward to sit cross-legged on a bed pillow near the edge of the wrap-around porch. Putting my scrunchie on my toe seemed like a good idea, as there was nothing out there but the planks under my pillow. After I did that, I looked at it and said, "That looks ridiculous!" and started laughing. The Universe replied, "It's hilarious," and laughed with me. In seconds, I was bent over in whole body laughter. "My big toe! Oh my god. This is so funny. You are so funny!! Kinda corny, but really, really funny!"
"I know!!" came the reply with a hardy, celestial laugh.
My Big Toe. Really? Yeah. Really. That is the end of a very long cosmic joke. It rocked and it was worth the wait.
__________________________________________________________________________
Life and Artistic Expression
Physical problems like what I had, trigeminal neuralgia, AKA the suicide disease, demands strong pain meds to withstand even the simplest daily activities or physical contact with any part of the face. Nothing cut the pain completely. Drugs made it so life was borderline tolerable so I could eat, or talk, or lay down on a pillow. Even so, I hated the price of a foggy, depressed, state.
Even in a debilitated state, I pressed towards a seemingly endless search for an answer; was it something I could physically heal or was it an emotional scar, something I could not easily gain access to? Maybe this pain and suffering was part of my spiritual path? These were the questions I discussed with doctors, healers, shamans, family and friends. Now, on the other side, I know the answer to my complicated case was a combination of all of those things with help from all those people.
The thing about soul-inspired artwork is you are never quite sure why you are making something until it is long ago finished and you have time to step away and look back at what you did. Even then, it may still not unveil the answers until you sit still and write about it.
These days, my intuition is my only influencer leaving no room for the starving artist syndrome. By living in The Flow amazing things, of which I never would have imagined on my own, suddenly appear in my life.
During the year leading up to this series, I continually woke up between 2 and 3 am and had a distinct urge to pull up YouTube. In those dreamy nights, I stumbled on flow acrylic methods crafters used to make fast art and cool looking table tops. I had witching hour inspirational nights before, so I just went with it. In the quiet of the night I opened YouTube and watched videos appear one at a time that described very odd and new type of painting materials.
My first impression of these videos was that of a weird merger of an art show and a baking demo. They used spatulas, wooden panels, wire cookie cooling racks, and plastic cups filled with layers of liquid paint. In the end, I received a well organized list of flow art materials and techniques on how to calculate percentages of medium-to-pigment.
The next phase was a relentless demand to assemble a new studio setup designed for flow paintings. When I had all the materials and I practiced on small panels, I developed a distinctive technique and refer to it as the Intentional Flow method.
I worked with this method day and night, I experienced a sort of out-of-body quality of life, which it lasted over six months. During that time, the new method was ingrained and reproducible. While the new flow techniques were assembling in my subconscious, I did not pause to analyze or question what was happening—I simply gave myself over to my muse and followed my intuition. If a technical problem showed up, an answer appeared by morning. It was a sublimely serene time, even though I was energized and excited as I worked around the clock creating this new series.
While embracing this style of totally intuitive trance-like of creativity, I stepped into the intuitive flow while fully present, relaxed my will, and let go. No preconceived ideas. No plans. Just magical results.
After I completed a dozen new paintings worthy of hanging in a gallery, I could tell how my inspiration-fueled studio experience had a common theme to my journey from disabling illness back to health. Once that connection clicked, I saw how my previous series, Ethereal, the paintings identified by gashes, scapes, and cuts, had documented a long period of major, life-stopping, excruciating pain.
________________
The inside spiritual story of working in The Flow
When painting the "In the Flow" series, I focussed on relaxing into The Flow. At first it was uncomfortable and a bit like work, like when you first start to meditate. Eventually, you understand the more you relax, the better it is. I find it quite funny in a synchronistic way, that the paint media I use to paint this series is called flow acrylics.
The Universe is sometimes funny like that. It has a sense of humor. Actually, it's a bit corny and on the nose quite often. For instance, my formal training is as a research geophysicist. I worked on original research ideas. My goal was to use highly mathematical and statistical processes on data teased out of minerals or rocks to find differences, anomalies, or just repeating patterns which told me something about the underlying structure of my area of focus. It could be the paleomagnetic signatures of rocks, grand or micro-layers of sediments, or even crystalline phase structures I created in the lab.
I took that science research skill set and moved into Silicon Valley work life as a technical writer. I sat alongside software architects and the rest of the software engineering team to suss out patterns in what they created. I distill those results into human readable documents mostly for other engineers. Now onto the juicy spiritual stuff.
Several years ago, during a ceremony, my guides urged me to step back from analytical thinking and be more present. They started by asking me to stop counting things, a habit of mine, I'd count dots, lines, repeating patterns in tiles, seconds to initiate, minutes to boil, meters in blocks, miles on trips, girth of any object, and height of plants. A voice interrupted my count-down at the start of a plant ceremony where I was calculating passing time while waiting for the experience to start. Basically, I was clocking how long it took for me to see patterns and hear advice.
Suddenly I heard "Stop counting." Just a direction. No energy behind it. "Ooh. That's my favorite pass-time," was my first thought. My second thought was, "OK. I'll stop." Fast forward to the end of the week (I was at the Rythmia medical spa) after a lot of amazing information came down of what I wasn't sure what to do with. It was not the usual stuff. I saw my guides party hard on a stage with hanging lights built right on my abdomen. They were celebrating enhanced communication with me. They told me how my spirit was in a golden egg which they pushed into my newborn baby body. The next night they gave me a second one, sort of an upgrade egg. During the early part of the last night, I talked with my dad about his war time killings (he made me come up with a forgiveness ceremony so he could be guilt-free when he greeted my 90 year old mother when she passed), whereas on the first night Mother Ayahuasca drummed with my thigh bones for what seemed like hours, to show me I was "renting" this body and I better take care of it and remember where it came from.
At the end of the of that first visit to Rythmia, during the last night in ceremony, Mother and the Universe teamed up to deliver this final message, "Stop trying to figure us out." True; I know we can't really do it, even with complicated maths and particle accelerators because we exist here in this 3-D limited, earth-born, human bodies. At the last ceremony serving, I couldn't stomach one more ounce. I immediately threw it straight up and went into cyclical vomiting. After I recovered from the spectacle of puking on the altar, I figured there was nothing left to power a journey. I crawled back to my bed and laid down attempting to go into a deep, meaningful meditation. Instead, I was suddenly spun out into infinity and kept spinning. I spun so fast, I didn't know what or where I was. After an eternity of jumbled disarray, I landed somewhere... a beach or a room, I don't recall, but I do remember a question. "Do you know where you are? Do you know what happened?" My analytic brain jumped into action and I regurgitated fragments of a unified theory of multidimensional quark stuff and heard back, "WRONG!" Immediately I was back out in the infinite, spinning endlessly in a timeless void. I landed and answered the same two questions, the same way over and over and over again, in between the void tumbler sessions. It went on like that until I could just barely hang onto the tiniest thread of memory . Just a shadow, an echo of thinking I do know but really I don't know. I can't really know. When I finally answered, "I don't know anything," they quipped "right," and left me alone to lay still on my back, exhausted and nauseous.
That's not the funny part. The funny part came four and a half years later when I was back at Rythmia. During those four years, I had stopped counting things or checking for updates on unification theories. I was about to but then didn't buy a copy of my favorite theory which was a published book, "My Big TOE" (TOE meaning the theory of everything). To get to the funny part, we're going to see what happened during my second visit to Rythmia on my second night of my stay. By that time I was accustomed to not searching for answers to the big question, I didn't recognize that I've actually changed a little. I had a different intention for this trip. This time I checked in because I was literally unable to be around mean people for extended periods of time. I would lose my nerve and get weepy. I would walk away and physically hide. You can't live like this especially, if one of the mean people in your life is your manager. My intention was to understand or fix the protector part of me that had apparently melted away.
On the second ceremony night, my guides were back and this time they didn't come to party or give me gifts. This time I was asked a serious question. Would I accept them to merge with my soul? I said yes. My consent initiated a phenomenal experience. I can't describe it for you because it was multi-dimensional in an altered space without time. I remember lots of symbolic movements on my part and a few moments where I became very scared and asked to stop. They paused each time and reminded me I had agreed. Sometimes, I saw my husband (who was was back at home in New York) looking at me from far down a tunnel. We locked eyes. I could feel his strength, love and encouragement to come forward into the swirling mesh.
After it was all over and done, I sat back against the building 's damp outer wall with my hair down and a small red scrunchie in my hand. The air was dank and dark. The sky was covered with thick clouds, so the moon and stars were hidden. I didn't know what to do with it and I didn't want to lose it, but they told me to keep my hair down at the end. During the sweeping ceremonial movements, my glasses had fallen off and I didn't know where they were. I was disoriented to say the least.
I asked, "What should I do with my scrunchie? I don't want to lose it. I still have more plant medicine nights and I need it."
"Put it on your big toe," came the reply.
I was scooted forward to sit cross-legged on a bed pillow near the edge of the wrap-around porch. Putting my scrunchie on my toe seemed like a good idea, as there was nothing out there but the planks under my pillow. After I did that, I looked at it and said, "That looks ridiculous!" and started laughing. The Universe replied, "It's hilarious," and laughed with me. In seconds, I was bent over in whole body laughter. "My big toe! Oh my god. This is so funny. You are so funny!! Kinda corny, but really, really funny!"
"I know!!" came the reply with a hardy, celestial laugh.
My Big Toe. Really? Yeah. Really. That is the end of a very long cosmic joke. It rocked and it was worth the wait.
__________________________________________________________________________
Life and Artistic Expression
Physical problems like what I had, trigeminal neuralgia, AKA the suicide disease, demands strong pain meds to withstand even the simplest daily activities or physical contact with any part of the face. Nothing cut the pain completely. Drugs made it so life was borderline tolerable so I could eat, or talk, or lay down on a pillow. Even so, I hated the price of a foggy, depressed, state.
Even in a debilitated state, I pressed towards a seemingly endless search for an answer; was it something I could physically heal or was it an emotional scar, something I could not easily gain access to? Maybe this pain and suffering was part of my spiritual path? These were the questions I discussed with doctors, healers, shamans, family and friends. Now, on the other side, I know the answer to my complicated case was a combination of all of those things with help from all those people.
The thing about soul-inspired artwork is you are never quite sure why you are making something until it is long ago finished and you have time to step away and look back at what you did. Even then, it may still not unveil the answers until you sit still and write about it.
These days, my intuition is my only influencer leaving no room for the starving artist syndrome. By living in The Flow amazing things, of which I never would have imagined on my own, suddenly appear in my life.
he Break Through series of my intentional flow paintings, debuted at an exhibition in Redwood City, CA "The Main Gallery" in winter/spring of 2019.
