Painting Make-over: Sharpie and More Paint!

Radishes, © 2011 oil (and Sharpie) on canvas

One of the great outcomes of teaching a class called "Expression in Paint" at Artascope Studios in South Portland is discovering what matters most to me in my own painting. What elements are (at least currently, since things do change) so essential to my own way of expressing myself in paint that I neglect them to my peril.

I can't say exactly how this has come about. It's a combination of slowing way, way down in order to watch what I do when I'm "not looking," by which I mean not over-thinking or over-editing myself. When I am trusting myself and whatever mysterious creative force it is that moves us all when we are open to it. That, and actually painting there in the class under different circumstances than at home; I paint a little differently there, and I'm still figuring out just how.

Some of my best (I think) paintings happen when I: 

• paint over old paintings (what's underneath provides plenty of opportunities for happy accidents of texture and color combinations and things peeking through from beneath)
• draw quickly over an old painting, either with paint or with black Sharpie marker to get my bearings and leave interesting marks showing through in places
• use more paint (it's easy to get "stingy" with paint) and push it around, either with a palette knife or with a pretty stiff brush.

The Sharpie first entered my repertoire as an ally when I once drew a quick freehand sketch on a yellow-painted wall in my garage, and I found it exhilarating! 

I've been a bit timid about admitting my Sharpie use in painting, as if some sort of Painting Orthodoxy Police might get wind of it and, and . . . what? Ban me from the world of "real art?" 

It's as if I think my Sharpie usage might disqualify me from some unnamed, desired realm, or immediately confirm my illegitimacy as a painter. (I comfort myself with the thought that if Sharpies had been around in earlier decades, somebody who is now a famous painter--Picasso is usually my go-to guy--would probably have used one. Right? And if not, who cares?)

So here are some radishes painted over an unsuccessful semi-impressionistic attempt at fall foliage from a few years ago. 

One other observation: I held myself back from "correcting" myself as I went along. I resisted fixing things up to be more right and proper and "better" (realistic?) according to some left-brain critic. I think that's why it works as well as it does. 

These Radishes have already gotten lots of "buzz" from my Facebook supporters (thank you, all!). "Free and beautiful" is one of the comments that's easiest for me to remember and that I will carry with me for the rest of today.

Really Starting Over

Here's my latest post from over in Freedom Diaries:

"The story I am writing is about starting over to live my life without God." I declared this to my partner in an exercise at a writing workshop on an island off the coast of Washington.

It was June of 2006, only a month or two after writing my two poems about feeling shackled to God and burdened by God. I was trying to be faithful to what I thought those poems were telling me.

And I was far enough from home, from people who knew me as an Episcopal priest, many as their former priest, to feel a bit more free to be honest. Since I was in the Pacific Northwest, north of Seattle, I had imagined (in other words, I had assumed) that most of my workshop mates would applaud and embrace a kind of loosey-goosey, unconventional approach to religion and spirituality and that my talk of living my life without God wouldn't raise eyebrows or upset anyone and might even find a ready and sympathetic embrace. I guess you could say I was kind of hoping for that, maybe even counting on that.

And I guess you could say I had been a tad unrealistic. Actually, I'd been really seriously off base.

My story idea went over like a bad joke, and I, already feeling very tentative about it, was hyper-vigilant for any signs telling me I should reconsider and turn back from the brink. I already wondered if perhaps I wasn't yet ready to write this story, that perhaps I didn't have the requisite perspective and "distance" that time could provide. After all, I hadn't actually embarked very far along this journey of living my life "without God," whatever that might mean. But I was seriously thinking about it, imagining it, planning it. (But in order to write about it, I was really going to have to live it. Damn! I hadn't fully considered that.)

My partners in this exercise, three different people in sequence, were invited to listen to my proposed story line, then respond with questions for me, and I was to do the same for them. My three compadres, more or less randomly selected in the course of milling about the room, all seemed to react to my story in similar ways. Each one in turn posed questions that felt strained to me, unenthusiastic, even slanted in such a way as to suggest that this idea of living my life without God was misguided, dangerous, a temporary delusional detour from which they hoped I would eventually recover.

They seemed to want to talk me back into God, to reassure me that this dark time would pass. Almost as if they were worried about me, as if this talk of going godless signaled depression and despair, maybe a sign of mental illness (that would be my mental illness), some kind of breakdown, as if next would come talk of suicide and wanting to end it all.

But nothing could have been farther from the truth! What my companions didn't seem able to comprehend or to guess was that my wanting to live my life without God was a jailbreak, a life-or-death bid for freedom! It was my best hunch of what I needed to do to shed an immense burden and to become--perhaps for the first time since childhood, perhaps for the first time ever!--simply and joyfully myself, a human being alive and awake on this amazing planet. I wanted liberation, and the best I could figure it, that meant letting go of God.

I suppose I can understand and even appreciate their response. It's not as if sane people usually speak of going godless every day, with strangers! It's not generally considered a casual endeavor, like, say, going topless or braless (and even speaking of going topless might raise eyebrows).

I could have told them, if I had wanted to pursue this line of thought, that of course I know that if there really is a God of whatever shape or form who or which is everywhere in the universe, then my intention to live my life without this God was preposterous, ludicrous, impossible even! That I could, in my limited, misguided ego kind of way, imagine myself cast adrift and free of such a being/force/entity, but that in fact my very life and my every breath would still be dependent on it/her/him. In which case the joke would be on me!

But I really wasn't interested in that kind of thinking, so so familiar to me from my twenty-something years of theologizing, preaching, and fitting life into a particular religious worldview to be packaged up and delivered for the hoped-for good of others.

Maybe that's just it: I no longer wanted to have to think and write and speak about God at all. God had become (or at least thinking, writing, and speaking about God had become)--how shall I say it?--boring to me!

I wasn't depressed; I was energized, hopeful, yet also fearful, and I was trying to be brave. I wasn't trying to be offensive; I was trying to tell the truth. And the truth was, I was sick to death of God--fed up with god, with talking about God, thinking about God, shoring up other people's faith in God or ideas about God , trying to make God (the Judeo-Christian God? any and every God?) make sense, tired of being a spokesperson for God in any way, shape, or form.

After being ordained for twenty-two years, I wanted out. I was barely able to acknowledge that truth, even to myself, but this workshop on the other side of the continent had seemed like a good place to start.

By the conclusion of this exercise I wasn't so sure. I got scared; I retreated. I decided I wasn't ready to write that story and that, at least for the purposes of this writing workshop, I'd have to find another one.

The God Thing, part 2

Well, I did kinda suggest that I'd have more to say on this topic, didn't I, by putting that "part 1" next to my recent "God Thing" post?

And guess what? I have mixed feelings about continuing on. On the one hand, I said just about everything I want to say about the God Thing in the first post by saying that "I'm happier not using the word 'God'" and that "life just seems much simpler that way." Do I have to explain myself?

On the other hand, of course one short post doesn't begin to touch such a vast and convoluted topic--and by "topic" I don't mean God, but my feelings about God, my current "relationship with God" or understandings of God or beliefs about God, etc.

Maybe thinking about God is complicated for lots of people. For me, it's not just a semantic and theological matter; it's a personal, professional, and vocational matter.

Which reminds me of another piece to add to this exploration of the God Thing--for me the God Thing got inextricably bound up in the "Ordination Thing." And the Ordination Thing meant that for nearly twenty-five years the God Thing was more or less my professional specialty, responsibility, and area of "expertise," if one could ever be considered an expert in God! And over time this grew to feel much more like a burden than a joy or a privilege.

I know it might sound a bit harsh, especially to those who have known me as preacher, priest, and so forth, but here's the deal: The God Thing is just not really "my thing" any more. God was my thing (that is, God, and Jesus, and the Church, by which I mean the Episcopal Church) for more than two decades, although for many of those years I had a pretty strong desire to "try doing something else," though I had no idea just what I meant by when I said that.

That was then; now is now: You could say I'm just not that into God these days.

I'm into life and being alive, and I'm into curiosity, joy and wonder about this world we live in, especially the endlessly fascinating marvels and beauties of the natural world--the small things I see and hear and smell all around me, and the immense things (like solar systems, stars, and the universe) that I can partially see but not hear or smell and can barely understand!

I'm also into art (as you may have guessed--and may I remind you to visit my new website? and to do so often, and to tell your friends, too!), which I see quite frankly as one of the great options of the human species for responding to and celebrating life on this planet.

I credit the poet Gregory Orr for the suggestion that poetry, religion, and philosophy are three parallel strands of humanity's endeavor to make sense of life, survive its tragedies, and celebrate its joys. Of those three, Orr would argue, only lyric poetry puts the personal experience of the human being front and center, rather than bending human experience (or one's interpretation of it) to serve a particular religious or philosophical perspective.

Boy, did that make sense to me when I first read it a few years ago. In fact, that small nugget helped me to understand more fully one reason why I was chafing under the role and responsibilities of being ordained--that I wanted more freedom to use my creativity and self-expression simply to, well, express my self, rather than to be continually submitting myself and my experience and my creative, expressive endeavors to the lens and language and literature of Christianity and to the service of the Church.

A quick search of my bookshelves hasn't turned up my copy of Poetry as Survival in which Orr makes this observation about lyric poetry, religion, and philosophy. What he says there about the centrality of personal experience in lyric poetry seems to me equally true of all kinds of art forms, as long as the artist is not employed directly as a spokesperson or as an illustrator of a religious, philosophical, or political stance of some kind.

About a year and a half ago at an annual Christmas season gathering with old friends, I blurted out a strange and startling declaration: "I no longer wish to be responsible for the meaning of the words I say!" or something like that.

By which I think I was, without fully realizing it, signaling to myself and to others that I was coming to the end of my life as an ordained person. Less than a month later I found myself writing to the bishop to begin the process of renouncing my ordination.

(To be continued, I suppose...)