Artist Residency 2024
Quinta Mazatlan- World Birding Center
February
February is clearly the season of the noisy red-winged blackbirds. The sky was overcast and the plants are cut back and bare after the freeze.
What is Meditative painting anyway?
This residency is about exploring and sharing my outdoor meditative practice. But I find that sharing with others my process of meditation painting is a challenge, because it's not what someone might expect to find in a typical art class. In fact, I try to do as little instructing on materials as possible. In many ways, it's a process of unlearning. It's about letting go of wanting to recreate what we see, and learning instead to sit in appreciation and contemplation, using marks with a variety of art tools as a form of reflection.
I am still learning the best way to share this perspective with participants in a way that is helpful and easy to understand.
My guiding principle in nature painting meditations is to approach this subject as a curious student. What does this space have to teach me? What does it have to share? In carving out time to reconnect with wildlife, I find life outside the fast-paced, technologically-filled, convenience-focused modern way of living that has become our norm- a norm that is leaving us as individuals, societies, and members of a failing planet, sick. In realigning to the rhythms of the natural world, I remember that I am part of it- Healing begins. Meditation painting is a way to approach the landscape, to engage with it in a ways that sets aside the ego. I don't approach a tree trying to recreate a tree because I know that I can't improve on the beauty in front of me. But I can delight in the texture, in the movement of its branches and in the birds and other creatures that call it home. My brush dances along with the light as it trickles through the leaves and branches. I breathe. I respond. I honor life and recognize my part in this Symphony, not to dominate or control it, but to live in balance with. |
What led me to start this practice was an instinct that the wild spaces held for me something I desperately needed to address, but had learned to ignore- a feeling of discontent and anxiousness that comes from spending too much time in artificially created environments, too much time being caught up in the rhythms of technology. My internal complex systems needed to connect with external ones.
Instinctively, I also knew that if I have this need, others do as well. This artist residency- unlike most- was designed specifically to share this meditative painting practice with others. I've enjoyed watching their progress and growth as trees become metaphors and community builds in our shared experiences. |