The Painting Experience - Stewart Cubley - Your art is part of the big painting of your life

I took the Painting Experience Workshop up at the Holy Spirit Retreat Center in Encino Last weekend.

It was an amazing workshop.

I read the book a few weeks before I did the workshop.  I couldn't put it down. It is called "Life, Paint and Passion: Reclaiming The Magic of Spontaneous Expression.

3rd painting

 The book had great quotes:
p.xx "What is reflected in the forms, images and colors is the by-product of a journey that has taken place on an inner landscape. The real painting has been created on the canvas of the psyche, the true artistic product is the personal transformation that has taken place within the painting experience itself."

art is the pulse of the universe

p.6 "As children we were taught how to do everything: how to read, how to study, how to be polite. We  have been bombarded with the right way to do things. So now we are approaching art and we think we should know how to do it. Yet art is the only thing that we should not know how to do! Art is the place not to know.  To create is to move into the unknown-to move into the mystery of yourself, to have feeling, to awaken buried perceptions, to be alive and free without worrying about the result"

added more paper for the roots

p. 12"If you wait for inspiration, you may wait a ling time. The more you wait, the more you think and get tangled in the tight net of success and failure. You do not need an idea to paint, you need only a brush.  If you do not know what to do, just paint!"

p. 16-17 "Talent is not a gift given to only a few. Talent is like the sun shining outside the window: it is there for all of us-all you have to do is pull back the curtains and let it in. Talent comes from openness, integrity, simplicity, and the courage to feel and take risks.  It is part of being human... Talent is universal. You dip into that source to your heart's content. Everyone is good at what comes to them spontaneously.  If nothing is put in your way, talent will meet you there."

1st painting

p.51 "If you want to explore the unknown, intuition is your best guide When intuition passes through you, it has no choice. At every moment it has only one possibility; what needs to be done. Like a flower, it has only one way to grow. The mind, then, does not spend each moment considering possibilities, but rather enjoys watching the garden bloom.Life gives us the seed: the artist's job is to make sure it will grow."

p.71 "The unfolding of the unexpected becomes the energy that drives you. You discover how thirsty you are for exploration without analysis. You feel strangely at home in a place you can't define. You are truly creating."

2nd painting

The purpose of the painting process is to unclog this channel of intuitive action and allow it to operate in every aspect of our life.

p.74 " To be present with each new development in the painting and to experience it fully is infinitely more lifec-hanging than any interpretation."

p.81 "If you do not listen to your intuition, it will stop talking to you.  Your intuition, is like a sensitive friend.  If you question it, censor it, judge it, it gets hurt and becomes silent. When you paint for process, you don't decide what is and is not acceptable.  The gift of spontaneous expression has been given to transcend that choice, to open you to what you do not know, cannot predict or expect."

p.97 "self-discovery is about opening to the mystery-knowing less about yourself, not more. when you forget yourself and follow the movement of images, forms and colors as they emerge, that is true discovery."

p.104 "Explanations are an escape from feeling: assertions distract us from being in the midst of our present experience, from moving step by step on new ground.  The drama that's on the painting truly does not matter.  What matters is what we are underneath it, and this can be experienced, not explained."

p.168 "The pot is not the water it contains.  The river is not what it carries. Why identify with the driftwood that the river washes onto its shores? What you really are lives beyond any definitions or frame.  It is uncapturable execept for the spirit, which appears in the life of an honest stroke of paint, whatever its content."

p.174 "Remember that each experience is part of the journey toward yourself."

p.177 "You do not use art as a means to an end but as a way t inhabit and explore the present...Your art is part of the big painting of your life. You are on your own, standing by yourself in the middle of creation.  In the beauty of that aloneness, and in how you respond to it, you will find your passion."