My Art Speaks
SPIRIT ART
A personal conversation
SPIRITual ART - SPIRIT ART
I dip my brush in colour and allow my hand to move, without conscious thought. There are no pencils or outlines. There are no mistakes, just learning.
Spirit Art is all about trust, surrender and letting go. It’s about loving whatever shows up on the canvas or paper. Once a painting is done, I never go back to touch it up. No matter how it looks to my critical eye. I have learned to accept them as they are. It was a difficult process in the beginning, but I have learned my lesson. No matter how much I try to change it, it remains the same, unless it has to change. This is something every artist will agree with. That is just how art works because it is an expression from your heart and soul. Unless something shifts within, the painting won’t change. Art is the canvas of your soul.
All my paintings speak to me and have a message for me, (some of them private and some of them predictive of the future) . After I started posting my paintings on social media, I found that my art speaks to others (especially the spiritual ones) and they get different messages based on their perceptions. For that reason, I will not be posting my interpretations here for most of them. I don’t want to influence you. Comments are enabled below, I would love to hear what you see it them.
Some of my art work is here, some have been posted on other pages and sections of this website.
Shamanic SPIRIT ART
Painting takes on a life of its own. What wants to be created, gets created whether I want to or not and whether I understand it or not.
ART IS AN INTUITIVE FLOW AND I AM THE EMPTY VESSEL. A CHANNEL THROUGH WHICH CREATIVITY FLOWS. COLOURS MERGE AND CREATE MAGIC. I AM BUT A SPECTATOR, WATCHING THE UNFOLDING.
Art for me is about trust. It is a divine connection. It is a communication between the soul and my canvas.
Our right brain is connected to the unconscious or subconscious mind and has the ability to connect and tap into multiverse language through art. Art and creativity has the ability to bypass the logical mind to explore the inner depths of you and your connection to the divine.
From the time I was a child, I have loved art, loved drawing and painting. I loved exploring all sorts of creative pursuits. What, I didn’t realise then was that I was talking through my art and my art was talking to me.
I have always been drawn to art and creativity. I could never quite understand the need for structure or academics. I operated from my right brain and logic was beyond me. The fact that I had learning disorders, probably contributed to that difficulty. This picture above is me at age 14 with my art, and the one next to it is me at 41 years old. It was fascinating to realise that I had done similar art at the same reversed age with completely contrasting expression. One is young, coy and is looking down, the other one is looking up towards the divine, much older and mature.
My journey with art and creativity from a child, till this picture above was taken is the same, till I painted the one at 41. I painted a lot more paintings after these. I am 45 years old when I am typing this. Both encouraged me to realise that I could paint. So, my art has always spoken to me or rather my soul, subconscious, higher self or creator have communicated to me through my art
When I go back to my older art work and much of the sequence or subject matter, I realise that every piece of art created by me was a message
There are messages everywhere for you. It’s up to you to see them, hear them, feel them. You have to see them from your heart, from your soul, not your physical vision. I realised this after a long time.
Throughout my website here, I talk about how our soul knows and is always guiding us but we ignore the messages with doubt, often because social conditioning.
I didn’t have the confidence or artistic ability to paint an image from my mind. I was very creative and had innovative ideas. I would make new items from discarded household items. I used to keep those items to recycle, I guess that is where my habit of gathering clutter comes from. I see items and in my mind’s eyes, I immediately see the new item that can be created from it. These days, I don’t have enough time to complete all my imagined projects, so I have multiple unfinished projects. And because of that, I do have a pile of items, that might be considered as clutter for some but for me it represents the birth of something new.
Despite my creativity, I had a massive block for art. All through school my art teachers always pointed out that I was not good at art, I failed art exams and when I took an examination for a state level art exam, I failed the elementary level and my art teacher asked me to drop it as I wasn’t made up of artist material. This belief strengthened over the years when I couldn’t attend art classes. Even though, I loved art and wanted to learn, I would get fed up with the initial classes. I hated the drawing straight lines, circles, angles and whatever ridiculous structure is required to get you recognised as an artist. I even joined a course on fine arts and that was even worse. It was torture. Every one of these experiences disheartened me and it solidified and confirmed the belief that, I was not an artist. Even then, I kept pottering and continuing my style of drawing
When, I was young, before I painted or drew anything, I would look up outlines of the subject matter in art books, draw them and merge the images to make them what I wanted them to be on paper. I didn’t have canvas then, didn’t even consider it because I didn’t think I was that good. I had this belief that a canvas was only for artist and even though I could draw and sketch, I was not a an artist.The first time I painted on a canvas for a handicraft class, I was in such awe, when I look back on it, it is really hilarious.
Actually, it is only recently that I realised that my art is not about structure, it’s about flow. It was a realisation that, the reason I couldn’t adhere to this structure was because on ADD, dyslexia and dyscalculia, also partially because of epilepsy. That is a probability. So, it’s a no brainer that I didn’t like calculations involved in fine arts. I was not interested in the object placement, angles, lighting or shadows. I just wanted to play, to create, to paint and to enjoy the creative process. I was never good with rules and discipline and that’s how my art wanted to express itself. A reflection of who I am and what I could express in my style. I continued to pursue and eventually my art changed without needing to refer books for position or structure.
I have not learned or gone through any formal training. I am self-taught artist. I learned certain technical guidelines about paint mixing and layering during my creative fitness coaching training.
I used to love doing stained glass paintings. This is my first and my most favourite stained glass art work, probably done at age 15.
Important messages and guidance have come through at every difficult time or dark times of my life. I didn’t realise it then or appreciate them. For me they were just art flowing through me. The pictures that came on my canvas and their intuitive guidance only made sense to me much later. They were like “Aha” moments that fit in a very large jigsaw puzzle.
Then it all stopped for 17 years back. My creativity shut down and there was a big brick wall surrounding my heart. No art or expression could flow through. I felt an emptiness and a void, I felt incomplete and lost without my art. I self-expression in all areas of my life shut down just as my art did.
During those years, I hardly ever did any form of art. Sometimes when emotions overwhelmed then I used to sketch with charcoal pencils.
I have torn up some of them. I have this sketch of me in a cage. This was the worst and darkest time of my life, when I felt completely caged in, in every aspect, every area of my life. I could see no way out. I felt suffocated and caged in with life it self. I yearned for freedom but there was a big lock outside made of circumstances, family and society.
This is what my HeArt spoke to me during that time
Later, after having learned spiritual art, my art became an unconscious messenger for me. It was another of the ways that my inner and outer selves were guiding me to my path. There were signs and future laid out for me. I was channelling the language of art. My art spoke to me and it’s only now that I see the full picture.
I had painted this tree a few years back. All the work I have done on my self was always with the aim to gain higher awareness and to connect with higher consciousness. I kept reaching for the light but didn’t go too far and I kept being pulled back to same old patterns. As I have unconsciously painted then, the roots, though strong, are stunted and don’t seem acknowledged as deep. The tree looks stunted in its growth and the branches don’t grow far and are bare. This canvas is big, at least four feet in height but every time I look at it, it looks stunted.
I always looked up for healing. I yearned to fly free but always felt stuck, helplessly looking towards that seemed too far off and elusive for me.
As other healing modalities work mostly with the higher consciousness, creator source, the process always involves, going above your conscious awareness to the higher dimensions
Even though they were powerful processes and they healed, I felt, it was often temporary and the patterns of dysfunction in my life persisted. It was a matter of great disturbance for me, that despite working with such Divine energies, my life seemed stuck.
At some point in my life, I stopped believing in all these healing modalities I learned and practicing any and all of the techniques of each. So much was my frustration, that I packed away all of my work material, never to look back at it. I thought that, if Source, the highest creator consciousness couldn’t help through this work, then what was the sense in practicing them.
Until, a couple
of traumatic and painful incidents 5 years got me connected to my art again. It
was like my soul intuitively guided me to healing in the only way, it knew I would.
At those times, I was so broken and
lonely, without anyone to understand or anywhere to go. The only way for me to
express my pain and comprehend visually what was going on was through art.
reclaim my lost parts and empower myself. Some of these paintings were done
during those dark times. This was when I realised that my art was speaking to
me.
Painting this Phoenix was a turning point in my life at that time. It’s like, just by painting her, gave me the strength to reclaim my power and proverbially rise from the ashes. Since then, she has become an integral part of everything I do. Just seeing her, gives me strength. She reminds me of how my resilience. She is part of my logos, both for We Now Hub™ and Seeker Spectrum ™
Being a seeker and having a keen interest in the esoteric wisdom, I couldn’t keep away from my quest for deeper understanding to this existence.
As, I worked on myself, my tree began to change. My art is done without any conscious thought, I get into a zone in which my hand moves to paint. I listen to and follow my intuition and inner guidance. After a few sessions, my tree became whole and connected to different energy fields, forming a connection between the higher consciousness and the inner self, the cosmic energies and Earth, the masculine and feminine energies of Father and Mother. This is a different tree from the one above, this one grew slowly, bit by bit, it grew to what it is.
My art has always been a spiritual process for me and had given me guidance and inner understanding. I just didn’t realise or listen.
I have since then attempted to listen. Sometimes, it doesn’t say any thing and despite the frustration I have learned to let it be. I know now that the purpose will be revealed to me later, when the time is right.
It has taken me a lot of time and courage to share my art. I used to and still somewhere feel like I am just pretend artist and that others are better than me or that the ones who have gone through formal art training would judge and see the flaws in my art. I am over it now. Here I am sharing all of me. I was ashamed and shy to show, not good enough. I wanted perfection and I was my own critic.
But then, art is also a reflection of your subconscious and that is exactly what the beliefs I had about myself.
My art showed me this through a painting. It was really difficult to paint this, despite seeing the image clearly in my mind, I just had to. The insistence was too strong for me to ignore. After multiple tries, I finally managed to do this on a virtual platform. I am not happy with the out come and would have preferred not to share it here but again, hiding this would be hiding a part of me. It would mean being ashamed of my imperfection. It’s better to be vulnerable and show up as I am rather than try to be that which I am not.
But now, I paint with no thought, just intuition. I surrender and let go. I draw on paper or the canvas, I take the brush and paint, or pastels move with the flow without any outline or clear picture. It just let the brush, paint and colour take over. I don’t need pencils anymore. I just trust and allow my brush to mate with the paints and my soul to communicate with the canvas. The portal opens up in the centre of my canvas to allow the merging of all 4.
It might sound dramatic but that’s how it is. I get into a zone and can sometimes paint for the entire night, nonstop until what wants to emerge on the medium gets expressed. I guess, that is how most creatives work, whether writing a novel or expressing through any form of art, dance or music.
I have even drawn in the dark, by just feeling for the colours and touching a point on the paper and allowing my hand to move. Here are the 2 faces that came up on my sketch pad in the eyes closed experiment. It freaked me out to see this, especially when i asked for their names and I got names. I haven’t tried this again, though my painting do give me their names. I know, I probably sound like a total freak if you are a non creative. But, for creative people, it is very normal.
As much as I love painting, I find it quite messy and space consuming. Living in a small apartment with family, it is not possible to have my easel and assortment of art material out. Art wants to be born at its own time, so to have instant access to creative expression, I keep a sketchpad and colour pencils and pastels next to my bed. The surge of creativity comes through and inspiration strikes at the oddest of hours, especially at night. Maybe, because the world around me is asleep, it’s easier to tune in with silence.
