What do art and wisdom have in common?
The Art Class Adventure!
I painted this picture with a friend recently who generously took me to her art class with a group of very kind and far more expert painters than I. I had to dive past a deep reluctance to want to stretch myself to paint in an art class with people I’ve never met! It gave me some musings on wisdom and art perhaps being rather similar in process.
If you are an artist of any medium you know that after one piece is complete and before the next one emerges, there can be a time of great unrest and not knowing what… or if… anything will come. The unknown can feel scary and threatens to swallow up all hope of any future creations. So it seems to be with wisdom.
Wisdom waits, hidden, formless, in the unknown where the wise way forward, through or out can seem absolutely and utterly absent AND there is no feeling of hope that it will ever come. One of my research participants said, “you’re so close to it, you don’t see it”. Wisdom seems determined to remain somewhat invisible – as does what or how you are going to paint before you paint your piece.
My friend is a tremendously artful photographer-artist, doodle-artist extraordinaire and now she is trying her hand at acrylic painting. Despite everyone’s immense and gentle kindness, walking into the class definitely provoked those old primary school feelings of the teacher handing you crayons and telling you to Draw-On-Demand despite everyone’s immense and gentle kindness.
It recalled instantly (as art-on-demand always has for me) a supply teacher in kindergarten using my sausage people held up to the whole class with great annoyance as an example of how NOT to draw people and why, as a senior primary school class moving into Junior School (England’s terminology) we should be FAR past drawing sausage-stick people.
Being 6 years old I was deeply confused as to how else one could draw people and I thought I’d made great progress from pure stick figures to people with nicely rounded sausage arms and legs!
So, art classes, needless to say, have not typically been one of my top ten Things I Want To Do For Fun!
Sitting facing the blank canvas, an Unknown, and feeling the old familiar anxiety about Doing Art, I chose to follow the unknown and at least give it a try. It is a really good practice to get used to diving into unknowns in these low stake experiences and nudge ourselves through the anxiety, the resistances and old familiar scripts that critique us – since life will always and invariably throw many unknowns at us. Conscious practice at least makes the experience a bit more familiar.
Finding wisdom is so often about pausing in our NOT knowing.
Wisdom often comes to us from the muddy places in our lives, the mess and fragments of ‘what was’, before the ‘what will be’ has shown up. So often this is also how artists describe the way a piece of art happens. Wisdom is not pretty, or nice, or shiny. Wisdom is often hard won on the coal face of our lives and is a typically very messy process that can blacken our lives, our minds, our hopes and dreams. Neither is acquiring wisdom on the coal face of life a guarantee either, just as producing art at the end of staring at a blank canvas is a guarantee either.
Art classes, or any new creative process can be a good way to practice the wisdom formation process so we can build our distress tolerance for facing unknowns and managing, with great kindness to ourselves, all the feelings and thoughts that rise up.
For this class, it helped that my friend is very laid back, had all the stuff to use ready, coaxed me gently to think of a colour to start with and presto, “Dark night of the soul” came to mind with an image of darkness holding a crack of light peeking through. Off we went into creating the burst of light with yellow, orange and a dash of crimson.
That was the background. Then we set to creating the “dark” with blues, purples and reds (who knew they made ‘darkness’?!). I decided that it might be helpful in the future, when I’m feeling bleak or ‘dark’ to remember that Dark is made up of blue, purple and red. Already, it feels different imagining that… and friends are very needed for ‘wisdom dialogue’, as one of my doctoral research participants called it, when one simply cannot find one’s way alone.
And so, brush stroke by brush stroke, the picture formed. In the centre, where the last remaining glimpse of the background burst of yellow-red-orange could be seen, it seemed to me that the beating heart, the wise heart, needed to be made visible. Somehow, I think, this is very akin to how wisdom forms. We nudge our way to it, a bit of this, a trying of that, a “what if I try this?” and an “oh, definitely not that!”
Wisdom and art perhaps have much in common. Neither are linear processes. Neither have a ‘right answer’ or a ‘right way’ or an ‘only way’.
And at a certain point….in my art creation, it was also about the letting it go and just simply stopping.
Art and wisdom also seem to require us to be good at just stopping. Stop trying, stop working at it, stop aiming to perfect. Let go and walk away. Stuck? “Get a new perspective,” the teacher said at one point, “Look at it from a different location”. Applied to wisdom, this fits too. A different perspective can help.
My friend leaned over just as I was poised brush in hand with a feeling I should stop going at it but uncertain and not wanting to because it wasn’t ‘right’ yet. She just said, “mmmm… yes, sometimes just pausing, not doing any more helps.”
So, with wisdom. It comes more often than not when we let go and walk away from the trying to figure things out, or wishing for a change that cannot yet be or might never be, it often dawns when I release the ‘efforting’ and in the end, let go of finding wisdom itself. Wisdom doesn’t seem to respond to our beck and call. It’s not a class we can ‘pass’. So, with my piece of art. It just needed to emerge brush stroke by dab.
The broken heart is the wise heart…
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
The last stroke in my painting was that tiny dot of white, iridescent paint on the heart, just in between the two halves. It went there intuitively and without thought after walking away, drying the painting off with the hairdryer (a fast way to dry layers when acrylic painting). I mused after pondering my painting that this shining dot of light is on the spot where I’d imagine a heart is cracked or sometimes entirely broken and shattered, as often happens in a life lived.
Perhaps, I thought, this is where wisdom is formed right where the heart somehow, mysteriously and with tremendous amounts of love and care, from ourselves and others, reweaves itself back together into a whole and miraculously still beats.
Liz White, one of the pioneers and founders of psychodrama in Canada and one of the wisest women with the wisest heart I’ve had the privilege of knowing in my life, died in 2014.
During a weekend of gathering and mourning one of my dearest friends on the retreats with Liz that we used to share together she spoke the words, “the wise heart is the broken heart”. It just felt so true but it never feels certain at all in the midst of the breaking or the grieving.
Yet, as I painted, there it was, the white dot stroked into the painting at the very end touches that most tender spot where, as Leonard Cohen also said, “the light breaks in”.
Un-Wisdom?
Wisdom is a heart thing, not a head thing and it has the quality of that bright dot in the picture, shining forth from our lives after the valleys and dark nights, and perhaps, even in the midst of them.
Wisdom has the quality of darkness illuminated, as Carl Jung said, far more in my life than that of a piercing light. Wisdom diffuses through what has been absolute unknowing, unseeing, unclarity and sometimes, even what has NOT seemed like wisdom at all.
Wisdom gives us compassionate redemption from our mistakes and turns them into something other than the Great Mistake that leaves our lives in a wasteland.
Wisdom takes the mistakes, the forks in the road and regrets about the one taken and turns them into something that gets passed on and shared with another who might be beating themselves up for an apparently terrible choice – and it comforts them, because they know you’ve been there.
You may be drawn to use this picture as a mini-meditation to pause the busy in this week.
Ponder it from the outside into the centre and the centre out, as in a mandala meditation. You could mull on these kinds of questions as you do:
What do you not know yet about your own wisdom-in-life?
What is your relationship with ‘not knowing’ like?
When you face an unknown… what happens inside you?
What ways do you try to control the unknown in your life?
Imagine that right in the here and now lies the wisdom you seek…what might it be?
Listen to your wise heart, past fear, past anxiety, past the busy…wisdom dwells beyond what we know and dwells in the unknowing, the part of us that lets go of the known and listens deeper.
Remember next time you face an unknown – wisdom waits for you there and will gently, kindly mitigate regrets and weave your life’s off-road moments or outright collision moments into something more whole, more about your own unique being.
Wisdom will stealthily but with determination turn the whole kit and caboodle of mess ups and what might have become regrets into a simply rich and unique life story shared with deep compassion for your own and other’s humanity.
Wisdom works similarly to the skillful artist that turns any apparent mistake or ‘poor choice’ into a unique part of the painting and perhaps even, creates a Copernican revolution that changes perspective on art and culture such that an entirely new epoch emerges. So, wisdom can show up in your life… when you least expect it.
Wisdom has rarely, if ever come from the known and familiar.
Perhaps that is the point. Wisdom, like art, is born from the unknown where knowledge’s usefulness and the known, ends.