My Creative Process is

An Evolving Relationship with Spirit

While in art school, I thought the creative art process was something that I guided. Now I experience it as a process that guides me. As Spirit guides me, each image comes through me bringing a deepening, an inner connection beyond words. Sharing these images and this connection with the world is a source of joy. Here, I attempt to put words to this process-- to write the story of the birth of these images.

Each Color is a sacred, powerful being of conscious energy with its own nature or tendency for creating form. I work with these awesome high vibrational entities in the creative process. It could be called "channeling," but the experience is one of collaboration. With honor and humility, I enter a relationship with each Color Being. Each Color allows its energy to become fixed on a white sheet of paper, and in creating symbols, forms and experiences, the Color beings make the intangible tangible. I feel so blessed to work with this scared rainbow bridge of creativity.

In the early eighties, when I first began to "dialog" with Colors, they taught me about their various distinct energies. For months I painted the energy portraits of the individual Colors, using wet-on-wet watercolor technique. With little or no imposition on my part, the Colors moved freely in the fluid medium of the water. As each Color revealed its individual nature, I learned about its unique energy and consciousness; its energy spoke to my soul, my being. Each Color repeatedly created its unique form on the paper and conveyed its vibratory essence to my body-mind. With reverence, I observed each color, as it held its individuality yet flowed, without separation, into its closest relative within the Rainbow family--- Magenta into Red, Red into Orange, Orange into Yellow, Yellow through Green into Viridian Green, the guardian of the heart chakra. On the other side of the heart chakra, Viridian flowed into Blue, Blue into Indigo, and Indigo into Violet. Eventually, I worked with the whole spectrum and studied how it changed as it moved through the day. In moving out of Darkness into the Light and then back into the Darkness, the Colors revealed how they are strongest when the light and dark are equal. They are weakest at noon when they are washed out by the light and at midnight when they are reabsorbed by the darkness. The Colors taught the principles of relationship, balance, and mutuality while fully integrating the richness of diversity.

My apprenticeship with the Colors was a very powerful time. Their creative power imbued my being. I almost opened totally to their presence. After almost two years, insistent guidance came telling me to stop; I was warned not to penetrate further into their domain. If I tried to reach towards them, I would shatter, because at that time there was still too much density within me. The Spectral or Rainbow Colors are truly Light beings of a high vibration. I received guidance to work with intangible energies closer to my vibration, particularly the plant divas. I entered into relationship with them.

I painted landscapes. I began using pastels for their vibrant spiritual color and earthy quality. At first, I worked on site. I chose sites near water due to increased atmosphere. Being in watery locations helped me feel close to the Color Angels; they move freely there. As I painted on location, I could feel Spirit guide the process. This began a deepening connection with Spirits of Place.

One day as I left my studio, I looked up in the afternoon sky and saw the waxing crescent moon hanging beautifully among the summer clouds. That moment was the beginning of a two-year apprenticeship with Grandmother Moon. In subsequent encounters, she showed me all the aspects of her cycle.

During those two years, I learned that the work I had done with the Color Beings had gifted me with a new way of working. Each time Grandmother Moon appeared to me, showing me one aspect of her cycle, I wouldn't even think about how to paint her. With awe, I simply gazed at her magnificence; my soul-my heart opened. On the following day, I created a distinct image of my experience. These images came out of my heart's Color memory. I quite literally felt it come from that part of my body, rather than the right hemisphere of my mind. This new way for me to store and retrieve images was distinctly different from the traditional methods I had learned in art school. There I learned right brain techniques: perceiving, memorizing and drawing the lights and darks to create shape. There I learned to apply color as an additive pictorial element to be harmonized within the foundation composition of the light and dark shapes. In contrast, the Color Beings had shown me the power of the heart to create form through the resonance of feeling. I have come to know that the Colors reside in my heart as feeling, and they have power to manifest in the creative process.

During this time of landscape painting I opened my heart to connect with the divas around me, particularly the plant intelligences and the Spirits of Place. I learned to trust their subtle communications, a co-creative process, similar to that of the color beings and the creative muses who guide my hand to make a painting. It is a body-mind knowing, not a thought process. As my connection with the divas deepened, my paintings began to change. They began to include symbolic, dream-like images and impressionistic representations. These images came to me and through me, but were messages from other intangible members of the Earth Family and Spirits of Her Sacred Places.

The spirits guided me to Native American Elders to learn their sacred ways of connecting with Spirit. I was hesitant because I am of European descent. Yet, I was born here, and I am of this land and this family of Spirits. In this way, I am a Native American. I live in this biosphere, among the Spirits of Place here. The animal and plant spirits are my family, my guides. I honor them as the indigenous grandfathers and grandmothers did before me. I honor those grandfathers and grandmothers. The spirit of their teaching has guided me.

Under my first Native teacher's direction, I listened to and learned from the Spirits, within the experiences of vision quest, sweat lodge, and sacred pipe, as practiced in their tradition. I received a Sacred Pipe from those teachers. That Pipe led me to the powerful Native Elder, Hollis Littlecreek. Hollis, then in his eighties, had a vision when he was only five years old, which told him to share the Sacred Pipe with all people. He knew the Sacred Pipe belongs to all people; we have only to remember. Hollis taught me to be in my integrity with my guidance from the Spirits, to draw on the wisdom of his teaching, and not to copy his tradition, which is not mine. He taught me the making of sacred pipes. Most of all he taught me to listen to my own heart and to speak from the authority of Spirit found within it. Under his guidance, I brought into being a Peoples Pipe, a sacred pipe of a new way. I thank these Native Elders for all their teaching. Hollis' presence continues with me from the place of source, where we are all one.

During vision quest, I received a vision from the Rainbow Color Beings, a message that the time would soon come to renew my work with them. That work has begun. Words cannot hope to describe or hold that process. Color flows through me and from a sanctity that is beyond me. Pure clear images, without personality symbols, speak directly to and of Heart and Spirit.

At this point, my co-creative work with Spirit continues to express itself in three aspects that both emerge from my art and speak to evolution of my spiritual path. Reflected in my paintings are the many faces of my Spiritual connection which have guided my path: Spiritual energy work directly inspired by the Color Angels; Sky~Land Scape images grounded in relationship with the living Earth; and Visionary Shamanic and archetypal images that arise from my relationship with nature spirits, guides, and goddess beings.