RAZIEL (by Anonymous)

I have been receiving some wonderful feedback about my blog posts to do with the Process Art classes that I am doing.

This message really made me smile... :)

"Hi Wendy I just wanted to share with you how you inspired me to join ASTAR. After your initial classes you shared your journey and I was intrigued. I found classes close by and have completed 2 courses and all I can say is WOW! And thank you for the inspiration. It's been an incredible, symbiotic, spiritual and artistic journey xxx"

I was very excited to hear that someone reading my blog had experienced something similar to what I'd been experiencing. Something magical. I was even more excited when they agreed to share their profound experience with us, here, on my blog. :D  They would like to remain anonymous.

Here is their story...


My ASTAR experience has been a deeply profound and spiritual one. The art has opened the spirit and the spirit has embodied the art.

The last course I attended was Chance Art and as a natural control freak I found the "letting go" to be most exhilarating and terrifying. Each lesson revealed a deeper understanding of myself and culminated in a mind blowing experience which I am still wrapping my head around.

The exercise involved cutting up our "poems" we had written through the previous weeks, putting all these individual words into a bowl, we sat with this bowl and then with eyes closed pulled out eight of these words.
We then strung these words together to make up a coherent or semi coherent sentence, after which we wrote this sentence over and over again on a sheet of paper using wax, bleach, ink – whatever we wanted to use. Once the entire sheet was haphazardly filled with these words we filled in the blanks with colour ink, coffee, tea, more bleach again whatever we wanted. By the end I thought my sheet looked like a morning after a heavy night.

After tea we sat quietly looking at what we had done as if we were cloud watching, forming images out of shapes and shadows.
When I looked, all I could see was the outline of a face and the suggestion of wings. So in the spirit of chance I went with it. The entire experience was out of this world. I did not feel as though I was doing it, as I followed the lines I found that the shadows that were there already revealed the lips, the eyes and the body. It was surreal.

After class I was exhilarated, and in the week following I kept thinking about my angel. During a meditation the letters RAZIEL flashed in my mind. I wondered if this was the name of an angel so after swinging between wondering and telling myself I was loosing my mind, I decided to Google it!

And there it was. Raziel, the angel that holds the messages of God. The angel that opens the third eye.

This experience has challenged my spiritual beliefs and has opened a whole new world of wonder to me.




Raziel

 

...

 

Dear anonymous.

This is so SO beautiful. It gave me goose bumps.

Thank you so very much for sharing.

xxx Wendy

 

Giraffes

As I mentioned in my previous post, "Geisha", the second term of my process art classes focused very much on letting go of our inner critic. This was done in a number of ways, from passing your work around the class where each student got to add something to your work, to working with a blindfold on.

 

In this class we started off blindfolded once again. We used inks, tea, coffee, charcoal and chalk pastels to fill the page with random markings. We covered a number of pages, working fairly quickly, without much thought given to what we were doing.

The pages looked something like this:

 

One of the textured pages created using a mixture of tea, coffee, inks, charcoal and chalk pastels.

 

We lay the pages out on the floor and were asked to choose one that "spoke" to us. One that seemed to have a hidden image or images.

I unfortunately don't have a photo of what my chosen page looked like before I worked into it, but what I saw at first were 3 GIRAFFES! Two of them were quite humorous and cartoon-like, and another was more realistic. I also saw a couple of birds. I used a wash of black ink, some charcoal and chalk pastels to help define the shapes that I was seeing.

 

My final artwork, "Giraffes"

 

I was horribly disappointed at the end of this class. Not only did I end up with what I considered to be a really ugly picture, but I also didn't see any obvious meaning or feel any connection with the giraffes. The end result is not meant to be important, but it is always a bonus if it turns out well. I hadn't particularly enjoyed the process either, so I went home feeling rather cheated :(

 

The following day, on Facebook, a friend shared how her daughter had been gored by a tame boar and needed stitches in her leg. In her status update she said, "It has forced us to slow down. Assess, and figure out what this "Boar Medicine" means."

Boar Medicine? I had no idea what that was so I did an internet search. My search took me to a page about Native American Animal Medicine where I read,

"The Native American practice of "animal medicine" embraces an awareness that reveals itself when a certain animal crosses our path."

And, 

" Animal Medicine is that which you need to learn RIGHT NOW! and the lesson that is coming across your IMMEDIATE path. Another animal may come cross your path tomorrow. Your attention may be called to one of these animals through television, conversation, daily experience, etc. Regardless of how one of these animals comes across your path, study the message and apply to your daily Life . . . they have a message for you!"

 





Detail of "Giraffes"





 

The Giraffes...

Okay, so it may have been a bit desperate of me and really silly to have wanted to find meaning in the work I'd done the previous evening, but I couldn't help myself...

I looked up "Giraffe Medicine" and found this:

 

"Today Giraffe is letting you know that it's time to stick your neck out. Start making new connections, stretch yourself, reach as far as you can. You are up for the challenge."

 

And yes, of course it made sense to me... I'd just finished making a list of gift shops, online shops and markets that I could approach about selling some of the goodies that I make. Seriously!

 

So, the next time an animal crosses your path... ;)

Geisha

During the second term of my process art classes, the focus was very much on letting go of your inner critic. It was about surrendering to the process and not worrying about or planning the end result. This was done in a number of ways, from passing your work around the class where each student got to add something to your work, to working with a blindfold on.

 

In this class we prepared pages of rubbings, blindfolded. We chose various textured or patterned objects beforehand that could be rubbed over with wax crayon. We worked quickly and filled each page without much thought given to what we were doing.

The pages looked something like this:
 

Page of rubbings done with wax crayon.

 

Once we'd filled a number of pages with texture, we lay them out on the floor and were asked to choose one that "spoke" to us. One that seemed to have a hidden image.

 

I unfortunately don't have a photo of what my chosen page looked like before I worked into it with tea bags and inks.

I saw the outline of a woman's face with her hair pinned up. She had a thin elegant neck and her eyes (the birds) had luscious false eye lashes. I darkened the background with a wash of black ink to bring her out into the light.



The final artwork called Geisha

Detail of the face with the 'bird eyes'

Another detail of the artwork 'Geisha'

 



The week before I did this artwork, I bought a pair of false eye lashes made from feathers for a friend. She was going to Afrika Burn and I thought they would be a great accessory to add to her fancy dress outfits. Of course I wasn't thinking of the false eyelashes at the time of creating this artwork.

 

When I looked at the woman in my final work, the name 'Geisha' immediately sprung to mind even though she does not look Japanese or have black hair.

The term "geisha" is made of two Japanese words, (gei) meaning "art" and (sha) meaning "person who does" or "to be employed in".

 

The most literal translation of geisha to English is "artist".

 

Well, I suppose I am a "Geisha" in training. :)