Depression, Art, and Healing.

 

Lately, I have been feeling depressed when I wake up in the morning. This is a picture of me in the Valles Caldera experimenting with my new camera. The elk are mating there right now. The whole caldera is resonating with the electric cries. I imagine the caldera like a giant bowl with the elk all around the rim crying out. To me, it sounds like faeries or glitter. It's so magical. 

The reason I am depressed is because I have not been making my art. It's not that I feel blocked creatively, it's that I don't have a studio at the moment, I am in transition and I am living out of my car and house sitting. I also feel out of my flow, I guess. I am not sure how to put it. I have been doing lots of creative things. I bought a new camera and have been experimenting with it,  I just learned how to make pigment and watercolor paint from rocks and dirt and earth. It's so fascinating and I now have a big basket of rocks and dirt in my car with me. I'm traveling around with a mobile studio and I'm literally carrying rocks around. I am also making ink from Rocky Mountain Bee Plant or "Cleome". I also made flower essences with it. I learned when I first moved here to the southwest that the Tewa people used to use Rocky Mountain Bee Plant to make black ink that they would use to paint designs on their pottery. I researched how to make it and have been wanting to experiment with it since I moved here almost 4 year ago. I am on my 3rd iteration now and haven't fully completed it. I did experiment with painting with it a little so far and I was mesmerized by it. It is similar to black walnut ink, but it is golden brown instead. I love it and I am imagining in my head painting a whole portrait series with it. I don't know for sure if this can be done, but I think it would be so cool if it could be. 

Speaking of depression, I'm planning to move back to North Carolina soon. I think that is why I am depressed. I woke up crying this morning. I just want to be back in a studio again painting. I don't want to wait any longer. I've been in graduate school for the last 4 years. I ended in the spring. Part of me wanted to see what it was like to live here while not in school since I've been in school the whole time I've been here, so I stayed here after school ended. But I think more and more, I am yearning just to go home. Home to North Carolina where I have made a home for myself. I just want to have a studio again and pick up where I left off before I went to school. The last portrait I made before school started was of a woman who asked for a commission. She is the only commission I agreed to (except for one with embroidered bees, which is not really my main thing, but I did it.). The woman's name is Kristin. I loved what Kristin told me when she reached out to me. She said that she had seen my paintings and she wanted a painting of herself naked because she was a recovery alcoholic and she felt that having a painting of herself naked in her own space would help her heal and feel more in love with her own body. This was so right up my ally and I felt like she was the only person who had asked for a commission who really "got" what I was doing. I visited my graduate school in November of 2018, flew back and made her painting right before I left for school that December. Everything flowed. 

Being in the flow is the best feeling I have experienced in this lifetime. I think it is how we are meant to feel all the time. It is so incredibly magical and there is no way to deny that there is Something outside of ourselves that is orchestrating everything and lovingly guiding us when we are in our flow, because things happen that we could never possibly control that are so synchronistically perfect and fall into place. It really is astonishing. It shifts everything. We can never unlearn this reality once we've experienced it. We can never go back to not knowing that it exists. 

I've been reading Rebecca Rebouche's website and blog lately. I love her. She is such an inspiration to me. She is also a student of the Artist's Way, as I am and I feel that in her words and how she thanks the Universe even for the hard things. 

I have carefully gone through 3 of the Artist's Way books, The Artist's Way, Walking in this World, and Finding Water. I have been wanting to go through "The Vein of Gold" for several years now (I bought it in Ireland in 2015). I have started it several times and now that I am done with graduate school, I think it is time. I will be moving back to North Carolina at the end of November. I will be getting a studio and getting to work. I will begin "The Vein of Gold" then if not before. 

There's more to say but maybe I will end here. I have 4 paintings here temporarily in people's houses. They are beautiful and I love them. What will I do with them when I leave? Will I find a place here to put them out in the world? Will I bring them back with me? There are so many unknowns right now.

I'll leave you with a picture of my experiments:

Love, Suzy.