Art Is a Way of Knowing: A Guide to Self-Knowledge and Spiritual Fulfillment through Creativity

Introduction

What I have done in my life and written about here is my direct participation in art making guided by the idea that art is a means to know the self. Art therapy, the profession I have been involved in for the past twenty years, is mostly about getting other people to know themselves through art making. I am an anomaly in that I have engaged in the process myself as much as or more than I have engaged others in it. Although I have exhibited my work from time to time, that has not been my focus. The process of using materials, struggling with their inherent qualities and limitations, has been and continues to be a wonderful arena in which to work things out.

Art therapy began as a loose collection of individuals from varied backgrounds who invented or discovered ways to use art in the service of others. Early pioneers worked among institutionalized children (Kramer 1958, 1971, 1979), psychiatric inmates (Naumburg 1966; Ulman & Dachinger 1975), and the inhabitants of state hospital back wards (McNiff 1981). Before training programs, each of these art therapists, in their own idiosyncratic ways, provided art as a voice for the unheard and forgotten. I have known and learned from all these exceptional people and for the theory and practice of art therapy, I refer the reader to their many works. I don’t review the art therapy literature here nor do I cite examples from my work with clients.

Although I have studied and practiced art therapy for many years, my most significant experiences have come through using materials to discover and follow my own stream of imagery. It is the story of these images and the methods of knowing that I have used that I offer to the reader. Through art making I have solved problems, assuaged pain, faced losses and disappointments, and come to know myself deeply. For these reasons I consider making art my spiritual path. I believe this path is available to everyone and requires no talent beyond the talent for living inherent in us all. The gift of creativity is within each of us waiting to unfold. The results of one journey are in no way comparable to any other.

This point of view makes me something of a refugee from the world of art therapy, which has gradually developed into a profession closely allied to the field of mental health. Many art therapists began as refugees from the art world, fleeing what had become, by the time I was in art school in the mid 1970s, the art marketplace. Art for art’s sake, the doctrine of modernism, left out human empathy and stressed alienation as the hallmark of the artist. Since the 1950s, art has developed into a profession spawning whole industries which reflect the general fragmentation of work life in our society. Critics, journalists, art historians, curators, dealers, and collectors all vie for the role of the creator of meaning, while the artist stands mutely by, heroically isolated.

Art therapy seemed originally a refuge; it confirmed my need to connect with others. It seemed like work that returned to the origins of art as spiritual communication and the sacralizing of experience (Gablik 1992). But gradually art therapy, too, has embraced the ideal of professionalism. Too often art making is being coopted as just another treatment modality with prescribed goals and outcomes requiring predetermined meanings assigned to images. This sanitized, soulless version of art must be administered to others, interpreted by trained professionals. This sort of professionalism robs art of one of its most potent properties, the ability to dissolve boundaries and reveal our interconnectedness with one another, as well as reveal the dignity of our uniqueness.

At one time, prior to the rise of industrialism and the burgeoning of professional specialization, one way society created culture was through a rich folk art tradition. Ordinary people made objects and images to mark births and deaths, memorialize important experiences, and enhance their pleasure in living. These objects now reside in places like the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia, made precious by their scarcity. Meanwhile, our consumer culture substitutes greeting cards and craft kits for personal expression among the masses, while genuine folk art items fetch increasingly high prices as the newest segment of the art market. Art therapy pioneer Edith Kramer suggests that art as a form of therapy has arisen to fill the void created by the depleting nature of contemporary work in tandem with the demise of the participatory folk art tradition and the rise of spectator recreation. Art as a way of knowing offers a path back to direct participation in life.

Suzi Gablik in The Reenchantment of Art describes how some artists are beginning to reject modernist and postmodernist ideals of alienation and isolation in favor of art that is empathic, connected, and alive. She says: The necessity for art to transform its goals and become accountable in the planetary whole is incompatible with aesthetic attitudes still predicated on the late-modernist assumption that art has no ‘useful’ role to play in the larger sphere of things (1991:7).

There are a number of individuals whose work I admire and have been sustained by during my own development. Each recognizes the useful role art can play both for the individual and for society. Florence Cane, author of The Artist in Each of Us (1951), created methods through which her students learned to access authentic personal imagery. She was among the first visual artists to recognize the paramount role of bodily experience and the integrating effect of art on the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual totality of a human being. Her work offered to ordinary people the methods adapted by her sister, art therapist Margaret Naumburg, in her work with individuals suffering mental illness.

Elizabeth Layton, who believed that drawing saved her life (Mid-America Arts Alliance 1984), began to make contour drawings late in life. She frequently made self-portraits to come to terms with a life-long depression that had remained untouched by medication and therapy. Layton, who died recently, never sold her drawings. She felt that their value derived from the effect of the whole series on the viewer. Bob Ault, an art therapist and friend of Layton’s, has created a course based on her contour drawing technique and has studied the psychological impact of contour drawing.

Edward Adamson opened a studio in a British mental hospital in 1946. In the foreword to Adamson’s Art as Healing, Anthony Stevens writes that the patients there found a haven of peace and sanity, where they could examine their private world and give it some form of expression—forms which Adamson, with abundant sensitivity and compassion, knew how to receive. (Adamson 1984)

Bolek Greczynski, founder and director of the Living Museum at Creedmore Psychiatric Hospital, in Queens, New York, has created a studio and museum that confounds all stereotypes of the art of people with mental illness while simultaneously challenging the contemporary art world with provocative shows by inmates outside the institution’s walls (Hollander 1993). Tim Rollins, an artist and teacher, rejects the concept of artist as isolate. Along with adolescents in the impoverished Bronx, Rollins and K.O.S., or Kids of Survival, as they named their group, create extraordinary collaborative work based on classics of literature as a way to understand and express the meaning of the literature.

Henry Schaefer-Simmern (1948) carried out art programs among varied groups, including delinquents, the developmentally disabled, and a group of business people, which showed clearly that authentic artistic expression will unfold in a natural progression in anyone given the opportunity to make art. His methods also proved that the artistic expression would develop in complexity, interest, and personal meaning over time without invasive teaching of concepts or contrived exercises. Schaefer-Simmern’s students found that as they developed their personal aesthetic they became sensitized to the chaos and disorder in their urban surroundings and less willing to tolerate the unharmonious clash of forms they encountered in daily life. Like Florence Cane, Schaefer-Simmern saw the engagement in creative endeavor as a means for people to realize wholeness and begin to deal with problems larger than their own personal experience, becoming ultimately an instrument of social change.

Among art therapists, Shaun McNiff (1992) has been a consistent voice for keeping personal, authentic art making as a key to soul rather than as clinical data. His works trace the lineage of art therapy back to its spiritual rather than psychiatric forebears.

Even more important than any published literature have been my fellow travelers, other art therapists and artists, workshop participants, and clients, who find art making a crucial and sustaining part of life and who have shared my images and generously shared theirs with me. These include my partners in the Open Studio Project, Dayna Block and Debbie Gadiel, as well as Carole Isaacs, Evelina Weber, Dan Anthon, Don Seiden, Shaun McNiff, Michael Franklin, Janis Timm-Bottos, David Henley, and my frequent partners in despair and chagrin at art therapy, my fellow doom-and-gloom girls, Cathy Malchiodi and Mariagnese Cattaneo. From their personal commitment to authenticity all of those mentioned have enlarged my view of what it means to be creative and to make art.

This work, then, is directed to those who suspect there is much within themselves to know and who can imagine that much pleasure can be found in color, shape, form, and image. It is an invitation to those seeking a way out of inauthentic work, inhospitable relationships, unsustaining professions, and any other sort of dead end. I believe we can, any of us, at any time, pick up a paintbrush and create a new fork in the road to travel that may lead us each to our authentic home, which is deep within, and outward again to our right place in the world.

Knowing the Imagination

Our imagination is the most important faculty we possess. It can be our greatest resource or our most formidable adversary. It is through our imagination that we discern possibilities and options. Yet imagination is no mere blank slate on which we simply inscribe our will. Rather, imagination is the deepest voice of the soul and can be heard clearly only through cultivation and careful attention. A relationship with our imagination is a relationship with our deepest self. Whether we have cultivated our imagination or not, we each have a lifetime of patterns and habits of thought embedded there, based on past experiences. Our expectations of ourselves and the world flow from these patterns. Suzi Gablik writes: What we are learning is that for every situation in our lives, there is a thought pattern that both precedes and maintains it. So that our consistent thinking patterns create our experience. By changing our thinking we also change our experience. . . . The basic step is to confront what we actually believe (p. 27).

Art is a way of knowing what it is we actually believe. Bernie Siegel (1986) is a medical doctor who deeply respects the power of the imagination in regard to physical healing. He asks his cancer patients to draw images of their treatment in order to discover their deeply held beliefs about the treatment options. He has learned that the belief of the patient, not the objective benefit of a particular therapy, is the greatest factor determining effective results.

Knowing what our beliefs are requires confronting ourselves, our fears, and our resistance to change. Once we know what our real beliefs are, we can allow them to evolve and change if they do not serve us. Fear will throw up difficult and unpleasant images at the gate of the imagination. Many of us worry that if we delve too deeply, we may find terrible things, or nothing at all, no options, no solutions. Joanna Macy (1983) works with the imagination to get people to break through apathy about being able to affect the ecology of the planet and other big issues facing all of us. She finds that at first fear and despair arise and even seem overwhelming. Once that despair is felt and acknowledged, however, it passes and new options arise that empower individuals to think of new ways to view the problems and to create new solutions.

Art making is a way to explore our imagination and begin to allow it to be more flexible, to learn how to see more options. The major problem for most of us is that we allow fear to stop the imagination before it really begins to work. Shaun McNiff says that the image never comes to harm us, and I agree. Our fears exist to protect us from what we imagine to be harmful. We need to respect their purpose, to see our fears without allowing them to control the great potential of the imagination.

Before trying to change beliefs through making art, begin by taking an inventory of some beliefs that you hold.

Contents of the imagination. Make a list of your beliefs about imagination. Include any phrases or truisms you have heard, like It’s only your imagination, or You’re letting your imagination run away with you. Try to articulate the belief behind such statements. Sort your list into statements of belief that are positive and ones that suggest the imagination is dangerous or trivial. Make a check mark by any of the beliefs you are willing to change. See if you can restate them as beliefs you would like to hold.

The wealth of the imagination. Exercising the imagination is a potent form of preparation for making art. Imagining can be done anywhere, anytime. It is a form of play that feeds our inner self. It is a little like stocking the shelves. Later, at another time, art making can bring forth what we’ve imagined and allow the image to take form.

The first step is simply to become aware of the endless stream of images that are available during a day. There are visual images, everything from the rumpled bedclothes, your face in the bathroom mirror, and the steam rising from the shower, to the images of suffering children that flash by on the evening news or the pattern of tree branches against the sky that you see as you walk down the street. There are internal images that can be called up at will, like your sister’s face when she’s laughing, or evoked nonintentionally, as when you remember a special place when you hear a certain song on the radio. Colors, smells, sounds, weather—all of these stimulate imagery to rise within us.

In dreams and daydreams we elaborate images into stories. The imagery of others is also a source; books, movies, poems, are filled with images that we transform by taking them into ourselves. Yet, in order to get through the day, most of the time we screen out images or are only peripherally aware unless something dramatically different comes into view. A spectacular sunset or a car wreck will command our focus on the ride home from work; otherwise we may be lost in thought and oblivious to the images that surround us.

The first step, then, with no outcome in mind, is to begin to practice awareness. Play with the different ways in which you can be aware.

The images are already here. Stop reading for a moment. Sit back in a relaxed posture. Let your eyes fall on the images around you.

Fifteen birds are perched on a wire against a gray November sky outside my window. My desk is crowded with family photos, piles of books, a half-woman, half-deer talisman I made out of sticks, a plastic cow.

Notice the images around you. Appreciate the richness of possibility. Pick one image to follow. Notice its color, shape, texture, detail. Where does it lead you? How did it come to be in front of you? Imagine an art work based on your image. What would it be like? A huge soft sculpture of your stapler? A pencil drawing of the tree outside your window?

Play with your awareness by opening it to include as much as your eyes see. What do you see on the periphery of your vision? Now close your eyes and shift to the pit of your stomach. What is the sensation? What image does it evoke? Open your eyes and go back to your first image. Focus on it; does it seem different? Focus on one detail of that image. Let it go.

Notice what comes up. Sometimes simply shifting our focus to images rather than immersion in our inner dialogue can be a means of achieving relaxation. It is a goalless opportunity for the mind to rest and replenish. At odd moments, practice this skill by choosing to focus on a particular image, then consciously letting it go. It is particularly helpful for relaxation to focus on images of beauty in nature. If your energy is depleted, try focusing on flowers, trees, plants, the sky. Allow yourself to rest in the beauty of what you see, and let that perception replenish your energy. These are very simple means of achieving awareness.

Knowing Memory

When I tried to make sense of how I have used image making as my primary means of making sense of myself and the world, I sifted through memories of my childhood. I was given paint-by-number sets on birthdays and once a paint-on-velvet of a sultry señorita, which I loved for its exotic darkness. The images that hung on the walls at home were few: a calendar in the kitchen from the insurance company, a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper in the dining room, and in the living room a framed portrait of John F. Kennedy with a lurid tan that had appeared in the Sunday magazine section of the newspaper. There was a statue of Mary on top of the TV and various saints on my bedroom dresser. Art and God were linked visually in my surroundings.

My own early efforts at bringing these two together, however, were not roundly praised. One Sunday, being too ill to attend Mass, I piously constructed my own rosary beads out of materials at hand: orange and yellow beads and a cross fashioned from popsicle sticks, painted purple. I recall looking up from my work past my mother’s high heels and beige cashmere coat to her face, aghast at my blasphemy.

At some point I discovered piles of art reproductions in a cupboard: Manet, Van Gogh, Renoir. I never learned where they came from nor their intended purpose. School art consisted of copying a teacher’s model drawing, at which I generally succeeded. Once for a high school art assignment we were to copy