Art practice as integration
This summer, I traveled with my husband and son, in our tiny camper named Pearl, from Washington DC to the desert plateau lands of Southern Utah. We had other stops in our eight weeks on the road but without a doubt the three and half weeks we spent in Utah made the deepest impression on me.
It was my first time in the desert. Nothing had prepared me for the bone-deep sensory pleasures of The Desert.
I could go on for, well basically forever, about every nuance of the landscape, the weather, the sky in all its variety, the terror of its deep canyons and the thrill of its stair-step mesas, the scent of sagebrush - different in the windy heat of the afternoon than it is in the cool stillness of night. The marching clouds. The washes. The virga.
Suffice it say that I fell hard. Some part of my soul which hadn’t yet stirred woke up and I felt alive like never before.
An artist friend of mine listened to me wax poetic about the desert for a while this week, as we hiked (back in the woodsy, steamy East Coast). “ I felt like a kid again,” I told her, “It felt like I remember childhood vacations being - magical and formative.” She told me about a podcast she’d listened to recently about how our brains react to the fresh stimuli of extended travel to new places. All those intriguing inputs basically overwhelm our adult brains in a way similar to how children process - with their brains for which it’s ALL new and fresh. It’s psychologically like “being a kid again”. That amazed me. Our brains are so strange and wonderful.
She also asked me how it feels to be back after eight weeks of adventuring. “I’m bored to death,” I admitted. That’s normal too, she told me: our brains adapt to all that delicious new stimuli, soaking it in and bursting into bloom. Turn off the spigot and you feel the mental drought. Ouch. “That’s me,” I said.
And so where does my art come in to this?
In the months before our summer trip, I worked on a series of paintings which I called, as a group, Inner Architecture. The paintings are a wander through my subconscious - themes and ideas and past hidden in the shapes and colours and under layers of each piece. When I returned home, jonesing for that desert now a thousand miles out of reach, I thought more about the idea of Inner Architecture - the pieces that make me Me, I knew I wanted to create a second part to this series but in the colours of the desert. Echos of the memories I carry in my mind of this place that renewed me so thoroughly. To use my art practice to cement the experience into my soul, to integrate it into my every day by putting it first on the palette and then onto the boards.
That’s what I’ve been doing since returning home. Four paintings are currently underway, and I think there are four more to come.
” … out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men, as sea and sky sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as a child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.”
–Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
