Back to Class

So last night was the first altered books class I've given since the move to our new apartment. The pressure was on because it was time to start guiding the work into a direction beyond dabbling and 'trying it out.' I decided to lead them in doing a journal page inspired by the techniques of Teesha Moore, one of my most favorite altered book artists, workshop-leaders, and creative whirlwinds.

She's one of the most influential artists in the altered book scene, and one of the most referenced or imitated--everyone loves her work, and anyone who has ever put a cone hat on a winsome face or made striped leggings dance has Teesha to thank. She creates entire worlds with her strange and beautiful and freaky characters. Her work appears to have started mainly with decorated journal pages, and moved out into assemblages and textile books and boxes.

In the history of women's traditional arts, (in the past: connected to creating things for the home, to commemorate the family or community, and for hobbyism, but usually not considered 'real art') there has been a long tradition of adding edifying quotes and bits of inspirational text to women's personal creative works. Teesha's work is part of this tradition, only in the modern context it emphasises the individual experience. Her journal pages are punctuated with inspirational text regarding the creative impulse and freedom of self-expression, and these poke holes in what exactly it means to Be A Creative Artist. She articulates in nearly every piece that the power to create is a personal quest, an expression of passion and life force, an inner calling to give form to one's own eccentricities.


She says, "When I am in the creative flow I feel connected to a higher power. So, of course, I feel compelled to helping others experience the same joy with creativity that I love to immerse myself in." And she is amazingly generous in giving other artists access to her style through directions on her website, sharing her personal imagery in sheets for folks to purchase, sharing her thoughts and pictures of her studio and inspirations on her blog, and organizing the Art Fest in Washington. Which I DREAM of attending.

Teesha writes:

"To me, making art is play. I don't worry what others will think of
it. I do it and if others like it, great. If they don't, I know they will move onto the next artist who inspires them. I create from my gut. I let whatever is inside of me come out, so I step aside as much as possible so that can happen. I am always happy to share any idea or technique I know with anyone who wants to listen because it is all about creativity and if something I say can get someone to shoot off down a path of their own creative path, there is no greater joy for me."

I like how she mentions that she gets out of her own way when she creates art, and lets it come forth on its own. I really relate to this in terms of shamanic work as well, since it is an essential part of merging with Spirits, and allowing their voices to come through in healing, ritual, or art.

Fate Wove Me that Thread

I went to the bi-yearly Imker Association meeting the other night, after driving around in the pitch black on the wrong road, and arriving ten minutes late.

Confused and anxious about my bees...it seems like one folk has perished during our very, very, long and very cold and freezing winter...but I heard the other one with whom I especially bonded: humming, lending their voices to mine. I can’t describe how much affection I felt for them, hearing them still sing to me, being able to sing with them after not visiting with them during this long and chaotic winter. Rush of joy to the heart.

Going to the meeting is always kinda hard. There are about seventeen dudes aged from 68 to 86, and then Monica and me. I miss Grandfathers, but I can’t say I’m comfortable around them. It’s a bit scrapey too because my teacher has just gone ahead and done what he wants with “my” bees without instructing or asking me: applying chemicals and feeding them sugar fat. Both! Gah! I have not made myself clear, have not planted my foot down...because I am not clear and have been standing on toothpicks. Wanting his help, you know.

Interesting fact: when someone says something smart, or that everyone was already thinking, or to show appreciation—in other words, anytime we would usually clap—the Germans knock on the wooden tables. Nobody claps. I’m in a banquet hall in Beowulf, waiting for tankards to be passed. Let the mead flow!

Picture of Bienenkorb: This is the kind of beehive used here for centuries. You still see stands of them in the Heide, the area of moorland in northern Germany that was deforested and turned into heather fields during the 18th century. Problem was, combs were cut out of them every year, so the bees died. There were that many bees, then. They are made of bound grasses and smeared with cow dung. Scientists just found out exopsure to cow dung provides a protection in children against allergies: only 2% of farm kids have allergies, compared to the average of 8-10%.

It was great seeing Monica again. She is the beekeeper whose uncle willed her his equipment before she showed any interest in bees. She is the one who found a wild swarm in the bushes in her yard (truly!) one spring, captured them, and now says they are her by far strongest hive, absolutely healthy. She uses a pure white goosefeather to gently push bees off their combs. She is the real thing.

She and I are going to be available at a bee-related info hut sometime this spring for answering questions. That will be interesting, given my distinct shortage of answers in this area--still. The task was offered to the other members, who coughed and looked at their hands. The women offered to do it. I would like to expand it into a huge American-style bake sale of honey-baked goods and a printed recipe book, but I think it will stay the way it is.

No use changing anything too fast. Countryside Germany feels oppressed by this attitude, to me. It's like a Sleeping Beauty spell was cast on it after WWII. It's like swimming against rushing snowmelt to change things here, I swear. (And, do I want to?)

So you might have guessed. This here Blog is about beekeeping and shamanic art. Also, people who have arrived at a fair degree of creative beauty and truth in their work, expansive energy fused with love...visionary art, outsider art, with power and wonder mixed in all proportions. It’s like the Wig and Bible Store on Colfax Avenue in Denver. You might drive by and wonder: what the...? Trust me.

Amazing Dolls

Oh! I am very excited about the work of Kelly Buntin Johnson at
her site Diddy Wah Diddy. Especially her dolls, the intercessors, which recall the power of Hopi kachinas and Ndebele dolls from South Africa. Astounding!!

Kelly writes, "I am inspired by the beliefs and spiritual practices of our global ancestors. The tangible shards of their existence, both common-place and esoteric, are fascinating objects, clues through which we can study their ways and honor their lives."

More on Minnie

Oh, I forgot to mention: check this film out at FolkSteams
http://www.folkstreams.net/film,71
for a short documentary about Minnie's art and life.

Artist Profile: Minnie Eva Jones Evans (1892-1987)

Minnie Evans is one of the first artists I think of when I think of shamanic art, because she made no secret of the fact that a spirit, an angel, stood near her and counselled her as she worked. (She said: “God has sent me teachers: the angel that stands by me, stands by me and directs me what to do.” And, “(I’ll) Say, “What on earth this picture be?” And I keep putting it down, until after awhile He’ll say, “That’s right. Minnie, that’s right. All right.”)

Her work glows with power, repeating ancient symbols and shapes which merge and morph with faces and nature images, resonant of the spiritual tradition in which she was immersed, that of American Southern Baptists. Many of her paintings show animals and beings that God told her were on earth before the flood, but are not on earth now. Her friend and agent Nina Howell Starr said, “Minnie Evans wondered at, but welcomed the ‘lost world that no one has history of’ that was so freely revealed to her.”

She was born in North Carolina in 1892, a descendant of slaves from Trinidad. Her mother was young teenager at her birth, so she was brought up by her Grandmother, with whom she was close.

She described being different; having waking visions from a young age: “The moon was shining and it drew my attention. He showed me the animals on that ring around the moon. Children said, “Minnie, what are you looking at?” Said, “I’m looking at those elephants going round the moon.” So they laughed at me: “Minnie crazy. We don’t see no elephants. We don’t see nothing.” I thought everyone could see them. I wasn’t like the other children.”

At thirteen she began to have a deepening of contact with spirits, as her dreams intensified: "Well, my whole life has been nothing but dreams. When I was thirteen years old I started having those terrible dreams. Old men dressed up like the old prophets; they would carry me down to the soldiers’ cemetery. I have woke up more times in that cemetery. My grandmother told me they wasn’t dreams that I was having. I was having visions."

Later, she worked selling oysters, was married at the age of 16 to Julius Evans, and gave birth to three sons. Within days of her Grandmother’s death, Minnie first began to draw at the age of 43: “So one night I was so tired and sleepy I had a dream. This voice spoke to me, “Why don’t you draw...or: die?” I said, “Is that it?…”

Her place of employment would play a major role in her art: she was the gatekeeper for a lush public garden ( a metaphor for paradise, reflected in her work) from 1949 until 1974, where she would later sell her works for fifty cents a piece, roughly equal to half her daily wages. Her husband often resisted her art-making, saying she was going "crazy."

Her first works were small drawings of talismanic symbol-like designs which morphed with faces and shapes—she made exactly 144 of these before going on to make larger pieces, colored with crayons and mounted on paperboard.

Surrealist artists had earlier given a name to the technique of spontaneously letting the unconscious move through the body and onto the page: automatism. This came quite easily to Minnie (she felt “something had my hand”) and she referred to this as “an engine” driving her hand.

She was mystified by her own work. She asked her friend Nina Howell Starr to interpret her work. (“She often volunteered that her pictures ‘are just as strange to me as they are to anybody else.’”)

Yet Gylbert Coker, a curator who knew her, said she was “cautious about letting other people become aware” of the thinness of the veil between her dreamings and so-called reality. He confirms that she had a shaman-like understanding of multiple realities: “there were times when Evans could barely distinguish between dreams and visions, as well as between dreams and wakeful experience.”

Many of Evan's works recall the folk art Green Man symbol, with faces emerging from plants. Other ancient symbols such as curliques, yonic leaves, lemniscates, serpents and its mandala-like symetry places her work in an visionary folk art tradition that has been expressed in various but visually-related ways, worldwide.

This skill has been variously interpreted as “recurring hallucinatory experiences (which) lead to a confused sense of reality”—although I have not found anything which confirms that Minnie’s own experience of reality was “confused,” or “hallucinatory,” according to her.

Minnie Evans experienced some of (what might be called) the secondary hallmarks of the “typical” shamanic calling during her life. She was an unusual child who had waking visions, she was challenged in puberty by deeper and scarier contact with the otherworld, she was identified as having unusual talent by a relative. She was given the choice directly by Spirit to express her spiritual arousal through art—or leave this world. She was driven by unusual fervor and energy to do her work, working on it for hours at a time, seemingly obsessed, and she followed Spirit’s counsel in guiding her work, which makes it shamanically collaborative.

True Seeing

Art that has power can be arresting, amazing, mystical, shattering. But art of our own time requires that we get inside the head of the artist and figure out what she was thinking first, so we can process it mentally and arrange our reactions into tidy platoons of ego-reinforcement. What I mean is, that even looking at art today requires that we spend at least as much energy defining ourselves in reaction to it, as we do actually experiencing it.

I want to experience art the way Annie Dillard describes running into a weasel in the forest:

Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key. Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright
blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied out our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t.

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

Here is what happened the first time I actually saw a piece of shamanic art.

We were arranged like an audience, waiting for a surprise. Our eyes were closed. They took a black piece of cloth off a painting. It was as large as a big window, rectangular, painted on a canvas. The image was benign, symbolic, talismanic, simple. It was quite a pleasant image of the symbol central to the spiritual tradition in which I was being trained.

I continued looking. We sat there quite a while. My eyes did not leave the painting. I kept looking, but not really thinking. I would look as long as they expected us to.

There was a tension and then the spring let loose. All of a sudden, I SAW it. I saw it with my hidden eyes, the eyes that can see beyond, that can see in the dark. I FELT it. I felt a wave of all that it contained: all the intentions, the traditions, the materials, the vision of the artist, the LOVE with which it was painted, the incredible LOVE, the gift that it was: the time and the effort and the persistence.

It blossomed in front of me, it caught my breath, and left tears in my eyes. I saw the details that seemed specific to me, personally, but for all the world otherwise simple and pleasant embellishments—a hidden message, another layer. I saw and felt the materials that went into it, how they had been spiritually-aroused to the task of its creation. I felt it’s numinous self, how it embodied an entire history and intention that had poured through the artist during its making. I was deeply stirred, but if I had not had eyes to see, it would have just been hiding in plain sight.

This is How They Remind Me

In art school, my first professor pretended to be offended when he showed our class his senior thesis painting of twenty years before (red acrylic rhythmically globbed on a vast canvas) and I said it reminded me of frosting on a cake, and I wanted to lick it. It was a compliment, but he didn’t seem to take it that way.

The good thing was, he taught us over and over that in a composition, the negative space is as important and must be considered equally to what is shown. This is one thing that I’ve often thought of, since. Shamanically, we know that the reality beyond the veil of spirit is equal to and as important as the reality of everyday that we see. Or, that one’s shadow struggles to be revealed equally to one’s high-minded intention. Or, that reasons-against are as significant as reasons-for.

This blog is about what shamanic art really is, what it really means, who makes it, why and how. There are so many conflicting definitions of shamanic-anything that I will narrow this down. I will begin by exploring the negative space. What shamanic art isn’t – according to me.

• Art isn’t “shamanic” just because it includes feathers and bones or because it looks similar to tribal talismans or amulets or because it uses natural materials or because it looks like American Indian or African or native art or objects. These things do not make a piece of art “shamanic.”
• Art isn’t “shamanic” just because the artist actually calls himself a shaman.
• Art isn’t “shamanic” just because the gallery or exhibition owners hint or say the artist is a shaman.
• Art isn't “shamanic” just because the artist claims to have partied with, or been initiated, abducted, or rescued by actual shamans or native indigenous people.
• Art isn’t “shamanic” just because the artist says she travelled far away and studied with real shamans.
• Art isn't “shamanic” just because the artist claims to have native genetic heritage.
• Art isn’t “shamanic” just because it mimics indigenous or traditional shamanic altars, costumes, ceremonies or rituals.

None of these make shamanic art.

The current state of the adjective “shamanic” in the realm of art amplifies a desperate ego-wish for coolness which overlies a soul-ache for authenticity.
It doesn’t help that the established, market-driven, so-called real “Art World” – at it’s worst – has appropriated the word “shaman/shamanic” cynically and ironically to lend a sheen of mystery and a whiff of power to often blown out, exhausted, ego-bloated exhibitions and works whose shock-method clichés really should be documented until we all fall down, laughing. Yet it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

My blog isn’t about that stuff.  Forget all about that.

Now, for the positive space.

Authentic shamanic art is made by Spirit,

coming through the artist.

Art is only shamanic when...

The artist designs and creates the piece

in a state of communion with The Spirits.

The artist may shamanically travel to where The Spirits speak to her, and integrate their counsel and visions and messages and symbols into the resultant work. The artist may open himself to receiving messages and visions from The Spirits while working. Yet the decisive factor is when...

The artist creates and develops the work in a

spiritually-aroused, poetically-resonant state of being.

To create a piece which contains power, the maker of it physically, emotionally, and spiritually invests the piece with power using shamanic/sacred/traditional methods which originate in the Spirit world. After its creation, the piece must then either be consumed or used ritually/ceremonially or remain as a working object, to develop and continue its resonance with the sacred power with which it was created.

(This has all been very mental, but necessary.)

I would prefer to skilfully lead anyone who reads this in a subtle and roundabout and poetic way to the truths of shamanic art. I will certainly be skilfully led in oblique and mysterious ways by The Spirits themselves to learn about shamanic art myself. I will share what I know and what I learn. But if it is to be kept quiet, then you will have to find it out for yourself.

True shamanic art illuminates and makes material what The Good Spirits want us to know or remember, and lets us keep the stuff around in our world to remind us.

To this end, they have more mysterious ways of speaking through the hands and minds of people than I will ever know...surely most artists don't define themselves as shamanic who receive guidance from the other side of reality. But nevertheless I will seek magical art and share it with you, here.

This is how you remind me of what I really am.--Nickelback