process over product

When I say that I value process over product, I’m not saying that I don’t care what the paintings look like or that the final result isn’t important.

Obviously, art is meant to be looked upon and I do have an investment in what my paintings look like.

What I mean, when I say process over product is that the act of making art is, for me, a spiritual and energetic endeavor.

I don’t make art under anyone else’s control.

I’m not seeking approval.

I don’t care if an outside viewer (particularly a hierarchical institution or self-appointed authority figure) passes judgment on my creations and finds them acceptable or unacceptable.

I’m not open to critique or unsolicited advice.

The act of creation is my connection to the Divine.

It’s how I stay well, how I move energy, how I hear my inner wisdom, and connect to the best version of myself.

While I’m happy when I create a painting I feel is beautiful, sometimes paintings are just me moving paint around on a canvas until I create a big muddy nothingness that gets gesso-ed over or thrown out.

It’s all meaningful, it all has purpose.

It’s the movement of paint that’s important.

When I am working on a painting on behalf of someone else, I go through a process of stepping into sacred space, meditating and praying on behalf of that person.

Prayer Paintings are intuitive, but they take a bit of time to complete.

I take care with with them because they are going to go into someone’s home and hang on the wall and I want to ensure that I’m responding to what’s coming through.

The end product is important in ways that it’s not with the fast and furious energy paintings I make for myself.

This week, I got slammed down hard into the current energies.

I felt overwhelmed with despair about worst-case-scenarios.

I was in shock over what I was seeing and hearing.

I went into a spiral of pessimism, and it stopped me for a while.

I was just hovering in this dead, unmoving space.

Then, I pulled out an old canvas, put it on my easel, and doused it with paint.

When I paint this way, with no thought of creating something beautiful or lasting, I paint wet. I don’t allow the layers time to dry. I just move, like a dance, smooshing around paint with a furiousness.

When I paint this way, it all happens quickly.

There’s nothing there then suddenly there’s something.

I began this painting in despair and left it uplifted, transitioned, moved into a different energetic space.

What happened in my heart was that I felt re-aligned and brought back into the love stream.

This painting helped unhook me.

I stepped back into flow.

I didn’t sleep well last night.

I was struggling with a set of familiar demons. It was as if the ground of my inner landscape, which had felt stagnant, had been tilled, unearthing them.

I woke up this morning, stepped outside, and the air felt cool against my skin. The sun was shining and I felt a renewed sense of optimism about the future - both my own personal future, the future of the country in which I live, the future of the planet.

I felt clear about my next steps - both in the physical and the energetic world.

I felt seen and held by the God of Love; I remembered who I was.

And that’s what I mean by process not product.

Creative expression is my heart’s language.

It’s the way Spirit speaks to me and through me. It’s how I heal.

I’m not going to pretend even for one second that I don’t care about favorable responses to my work. I savor every heart, every like, every share.

I love it when I know that something I’ve created through my heart has touched your heart.

I love the communion that happens in between us, through the art.

But acquiring love or approval is not the purpose of my art making.

Even if I were the only human left on Earth, I would still make art.

It’s how I live.

It’s how I remember who I am.

Sometimes I look at all these faces I’ve painted and wonder who they are.

Are they ancestors, guides, angels, aspects of myself?

Are they characters living out fictional stories?

Do they exist in this world or another?

They must be, in some sense, self-portraits, as everything we create is in one way or another a self-portrait, but they are of something and someone else as well.

This one told me her name was Evangeline.

I looked it up and found out the name means Messenger of God and Bringer of Good News.

I’ll take it.

In gratitude for this process, I say yes.