Wild Art!

What is WildArt?

WildArt! process

Like other subtle things in life, WildArt! can't be taught from just the words; it has to be caught and experienced for oneself.

With that caveat in mind, I'll describe the two meditations that make up the process.

Imagine a table with 50 colors of paint, an abundance of paint. Imagine you have lots of good quality paper to play with, and plenty of time to create.

First comes the paint meditation. You stare at all these colors, noticing what attracts you and what repulses you, any color that has a charge for you.

Then you dip your brush in a paint color that has a charge, turn around and walk to your blank white paper on your easel. You make a mark, any kind of mark. It could be a dot, a slash, a box, a squiggle, a zigzag. You look at the mark you've made with your first color, and you notice what it looks like to you, what it reminds you of, if anything. You see it and forget about it. That's the second meditation, noticing and forgetting about it.

You turn around and walk from your easel back to the 50 colors of paint. Then you repeat the paint meditation looking at all the paints and noticing If a color attracts or repulses you, dipping your brush in, turning around, and walking back to your paper on your easel to make a second mark. After the second mark, you notice what the two marks together look like to you, if they resemble something.

Then you turn around and walk back to the paints for the third time. You repeat these, noticing which paint colors attract or repulse you, and then seeing after you've made your mark on your paper what the mark or combined marks begin to remind you of. You are especially mindful when you select your paint each time, and as you're noticing what the marks on the paper remind you of.

Eventually, the marks of paint that you've made on your paper, the brushstrokes will look so fascinating, will look so much like something you are curious about, that you will continue painting what you've noticed, what you've created. You forget the paint meditation and complete what has emerged from within. Do you see how this painting has emerged from your unconscious?

I can tell that a WildArt! a student has caught the process when they are fascinated with what they are painting, when they can hardly look away from it.

If a student isn't fascinated with what they are painting, then I offer them suggestions or ask questions unique to the particular student. I have learned over my nearly 30 years of teaching, that most often, the student will decide to try something that opens them up to new excitement about their painting.

Discoveries from two decades of WildArt!

• Forgetting the paint meditation: it happens pretty much every time. The pull of your own unconscious is stronger than your conscious ability to remember the meditation.

• Invisibility: Maybe you think that you are exposing deepest most forbidden Secrets? Most often no one can tell what you are revealing.

• Exploration of trauma therapy couldn't reach: think you'll drown in fear or pain? Maybe not, a remarkable Detachment or even Delight can come as you heal yourself or conversely, when feeling great you assume you'll cruise and paint fun things, but trauma could emerge as in Vipassana just prior to Bangha.

• For specific Growers only, a mirror held up cuts you: those attached to a pretty image may become disappointed.

• Integrating shadow colors: ugly judgment becomes beauty.

• Separating critic from creative process: the critic gets its own canvas, eventually surrenders, becoming appropriately subordinate.

• Being open to the unexpected, you never know what you'll paint, never! But it will always be the same thing.

• Synchronicity: several paint the same specific image the same day without looking at each other's art. We're connected inside.

• A different sort of time, maybe sempternality: you start where you left off, even with a gap of years. A different kind of space-time: you are always there with these deep impressions until you face them and dissolve them in conscious love.

• A kind of world work: you paint what needs healing in the world at this moment even if the moment was thousands of years ago. For example the slaughter of Buddhist monks by a Mongol horde.

• A very big landscape art fits together in color and form and content from over 20 years creating a huge voluptuous landscape, relating with pictures from different times touching each other as a coherent whole.

From Dream Maps and Travel Log by Ken Rothman 2015 pp 72-73

How WildArt! Began

For Elaine Fielder

Elaine shared photos of her paintings at a creativity day in a Hakomi therapist training in 1988. Like others in the training, I was very intrigued and asked her how she did it. The next month she gave a two-hour mini-workshop so we fellow students could try her technique.  I loved it and found it could take me places different and in some ways deeper than the therapies I was giving myself, trading, and paying for. Elaine mentioned she had learned from Michelle Cassou and Stewart Cubley at the Painting Experience in the San Francisco Bay area. The painting I did at Elaine's demonstration eventually sold to Seattle art collector Paul Ebner Gartz.

I took the technique home and painted a dozen large paintings and several smaller ones. I was so immersed in it that I would bring the small ones to work to paint during breaks; and, when I had the time, would stay up all night painting, and fall asleep exhausted sometime the next day. I involved myself in the process of painting, and, although I often liked what emerged on my paper, my intimate friends didn't seem to think much of what I produced, except as a therapy for me. It certainly was that, and I was happy with it as such. I learned about going over boundaries to discover vast reserves of creativity and energy. I also learned that if I followed the process I would paint private, vulnerable, sensitive issues that would be invisible to viewers. What a discovery! I could work out the details of my worst trauma in bold vibrant color while keeping it private from everyone but those it was my choice to let in on it. 

Eventually, I noticed a small classified ad in the local weekly where a gallery owner wanted submissions from artists. I traded with a friend to take some photos of the paintings for me and sent them in. When they didn't return in two months I looked up the gallery to ask for them back. I received quite a shock when Ed Waznis, the gallery owner, told me he'd been looking for me but had lost my contact information. He said that he'd taken my photos to a Los Angeles art exhibitor's convention and “people really liked them.” He said he owned the Montgomery Galleries of, I believe, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and New York. He said he definitely wanted to do a show of my work, with a painter from Sweden, who, Ed said, had similar images coming through him. He wanted to know how much money I got for my paintings. I told him I'd never tried to sell one. When I didn't hear from Ed in a month I called him again, and he apologized. He said he'd just received a huge opportunity in his career. He had become the exclusive distributor in North America for lithographs of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales work. Ed said he would not be able to do any other projects, including mine, and he returned my photos.

The contact with Ed changed me, and the way I valued my art. Within a few months, Leigh Files, an art therapist and the founder and director of a school to train other art therapists bought a large painting of mine called “Mindwashed.” 

Similar to Elaine Fielder I brought photos of my art to therapeutic workshops that I attended. At a workshop led by Drs. Arnold and Amy Mindell held in Seattle I met Paul Ebner Gartz. Paul collected art, he liked me and the photos. He bought first one, then three, then several more and finally more than a dozen paintings. Here is what he said:

“Ken's paintings evoke a deep personal and spiritual message for me. What I love about his works is that they can be read at so many different levels from the purely aesthetic appreciation of his use of color and form to the exalted, almost transcendental reinterpretation he gives his inner life experiences. I find constant pleasure in learning anew each time I look at one of his pieces and enjoy owning many of them.”

So what is the technique that produced this? Of course, it has evolved in my personal painting, but I present it at a WildArt! play-shop as follows:

“Let yourself meditate on the many colors of paint in front of you. Just notice which attracts you, which repels you, and which are neutral. Find one with a strong charge of attraction or repulsion. Put your brush into it and carry it over to make a mark on your paper. Notice what the brush stroke looks like, just observe it. Next, walk back to the array of choices of paint colors and notice again what attracts or repulses you, without considering what is already on your paper. Dip your brush into a second color that attracts or repels you or this could be the same color as the first brush full, then make a second brush stroke on your paper. Notice when the symbol-making part of your mind begins to tell you what you've made looks like. Just observe this part of yourself and walk back to the paint, repeating the procedure.

 Eventually, the symbol-making part of your mind overwhelms the observer, and you commence painting something from deep within your unconscious that is so fascinating to you, that you barely remember where you are.

People make discoveries in this process. Sometimes the discovery involves using colors and forms the painter considers ugly and going far enough with it, continuing to paint long enough without giving up, to notice that the result is beautiful. This can bring personal growth beyond the realm of art. This happens when a person goes beyond an edge, a concept pioneered by Drs. Arnold and Amy Mindell and taught to me by Dr. Gary Reiss. 

Frequently a critical inner voice comes up that distracts the painter from the technique. Sometimes it is the voice of a childhood art teacher, parent, or authority. Sometimes the critic is specifically critical about the color picked, the brush stroke used, or how the painting looks. Other times the critic attacks the artist more globally with “you can't paint,” or “you are no good,” or “this is idiotic, and I'll just go along with it to be nice.” I notice this could be happening when a painter stops painting; or when they think they are finished with a painting with little painted. Usually, I enter their space and observe their painting with them. Then I ask if they are sure they are finished with it. Usually, the student says they “think” they are finished but are not sure. I suggest that they return to the paint, resume the technique of noticing pushes and pulls in paint color, and try to place “just one more dot” onto their painting, perhaps different from the rest that is there. Frequently this loosens up the student's creativity, and they become fascinated with their process and painting. It is fairly easy for me to tell if a student is actively engaged in this process because they stare in fascination at what their unconscious unwinds in vivid color on the paper in front of them.

Moineddin Jablonski, my Sufi teacher, in expanding the “3-Self Work” of Freida Waterhouse into his “Soul Work” by the inclusion of the inner critics, maintained the greatest obstacle to a harmonious peaceful human being, and to collective outer harmony and world peace, is the inner critics. He believed working with them intentionally and with great loving-kindness and understanding is paramount to today's evolution of humanity, and to our survival. He told me he believed this is his major contribution to the Sufi work.

Often an inner critic will cause an art student to become stuck. If this occurs I will enter into their process with them as unobtrusively as I am able to and ask what is happening. Then I'll suggest something to get them unstuck. Usually the suggestions are simple and very specific to the person. For example, an experienced artist will sometimes get stuck as their inner critic will obsess about how their work looks, perhaps not refined, or defined by their usual style. Sometimes a suggestion as simple as using their opposite hand to paint will free them to resume enjoying the technique to further explore their inner landscape. 

Sometimes a critic will become loud and demanding. The student will often feel shame, and that their work is ugly. When this happens I will sometimes suggest they put a second paper next to their first; when the ugly thought arises in their mind then they can make an ugly paint stroke on that ugly paper. Sometimes, later, and to great surprise, the student finds the “ugly” paper painted by, or for the critic, is not so ugly at all, but suffused with enormous vitality.

Often the correct suggestion will produce freeing of creativity and delight. There are many of them, I won't mention them all, the students who received them know. 

A poor suggestion by me, as often happens, can result in the student figuring out how to free themselves.

With repeat students, advanced students who could do this process all day without my input, the thing most frequently wanted is an encouragement to go into the aspect of their painting that most fascinates them. To paint the tiny detail bigger to “see what is inside it.” These students and I have discovered that themes emerge that sometimes stay dormant for years, since the last time we did this painting process. It is always a bit of a surprise. 

We have also noticed repeatedly collective themes emerging where two or more people paint the same very specific image without having looked at each other's work.

Sometimes a painter takes a little swallow of this water, metaphorically, and uses it to loosen up their style, to inject some more life into it. They will happily paint, all day long, without taking a second or third swallow. Using WildArt! this way is fine with me. They can drink more whenever they wish.

There are some other physical plane things that help create the atmosphere for going over edges into creativity that involves abundance. There is more than enough paper, paint, space, and time to play or work hard.

1996