2 posts tagged “images”

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
--Rudyard Kipling

Writers love words, and the power they carry and amass when joined with other words.  Part of writer’s job is not only to tell a story, but to also develop a way with words that allows you to convey your chosen story in a way that moves the reader.

But writers can never adore the words we write, the phrases and paragraphs we craft, to such a degree that we fail to look at what we writer critically and ask:

Has what I’ve written bolstered life?

Do my words inspire and affirm?

Do they tear down?

That the answers to these questions need always favor our readers and their situations is obvious.  How to accomplish this is not always as clear as one might think.

Since characters form the heart and soul of any story, what an author thinks of her or his characters, how much she or he loves them and coveys that on the page is a great place to start.

How much do you, if you craft fiction, love your characters?  

How much do their flaws endear them to you?

 Do they repel you?

Do your characters even have flaws?

How big are your protagonist’s problematic character traits and do they play prominently into your story line?

The same can be asked of a painter concerning the images beckoning her or him to give them life on a canvas.

I was once taught that the three C’s of a story with which readers resonate are: character, conflict and core emotional need. And every good painting has a plot that lay embedded in the overall disposition or spirit of the painting.

A character whose life so touches readers that the readers are compelled to finish the story, if for no other reason than to know that this character will survive is a well-written book. Vibrant and vivid characters write the most entertaining and moving books by guiding the author’s hand, just as the most abundant and forceful images energize us to pick lift a brush and construct what our minds thought our hand and fingers incapable of painting.  To gain this strength, the character must feel that she is accepted, love, not in spite of, but because of her or his flaws.

This acceptance is inherent on the writer or painter’s part when she or he surrenders to the call of the muse, the inner yearnings of a soul striving to assert its immortal presence upon the world and humans.

The first ears that the words of our characters touch, the eyes that perceive these images and visual ideas in their most nascent and raw forms, are that of the writer and painter who will construct and shape them. These artists’ hands will bring formlessness into being and provide them with a viable container rendering them comprehensible to the world.

In the best of all circumstances the forms we apply to our creations allows the work to evolve over time—that each new set of eyes observing and/or reading the images and words spawns a new concept or belief, faith and realization concerning that person, their identity, and the meaning of their life in the context of the lives of others.

Transposing the words and images that come to us in our stories and paintings—physically availing them for others to touch and experience deepens the observer's consciousness of self and others.
This is one of the most vulnerable, and yet exciting, experiences in which anyone, artist or observer, can engage.   The artist must be present to the work—with every word penned or typed, with every stroke of color made upon the canvas--if they are to summon and hold the awareness of the observer.

Yet this is the place where the artist dwells and thrives—this state of being, ebbing and flowing in a vicissitude of tides and showers.

Rudyard Kipling’s statement deposits us back to the importance of what we, as artists do--that of bringing words to the formless stories of our minds, or as painters, casting images that bespeak a thousand words upon canvas.  

In either case, words are the intoxicant allowing us to imbibe meaning from these creations, and share our ideas with others, or rather acknowledge the affirmation and acceptance they have engendered in us as observers and readers.

Whatever the case we are purveyors of spirit.  
As such we must tread softly, and with awareness. 

Writers and artists we deal in a serious business. Our words, and the images that evoke more words than one can ever speak, carry the power to bestow life or cast death.

Our creations either resurrect or exile spirit and hope. The decision is ours.

The answer of what we shall do lies in our most vulnerable selves—what we see and encounter when transposing the musings of our psyche.

Today I had no idea what I would write about in this blog.  And then one of my children asked me to help them decipher a Tarot card layout they had made for themselves.  It was in essence a reading. And my child needed my assistance.

On helping them understand the nature of the layout—three cards from left to right and representing past, present and future, I was drawn back into a world that I had not visited in a quite a while.

 
I entered graduate school to study psychology in the early stages of pregnancy with this particular child who had asked for my assistance. I took my first class in Jungian psychology as this child gestated inside me—embarked upon my dream—that of learning about and coming to understand the inner workings of the human mind. 

After their birth and for the next four years I moved through my graduate program—a wife and mother of two studying what was at that time my passion. During this time I entered into my own process of healing, that of allowing myself to go back and explore areas of the human psyche and soul—mine—that I had always relished the idea of exploring.

In addition to studying dreams and images, I began to work with the Tarot as one of my attempts to heal while ascertaining the skills to  become a psychotherapist--one who would assist others in their desire to heal. Carl Jung utilized astrology and Tarot with his clients. And so one summer, when this child was little more than three years old, I ventured on an experience of learning to swim—a major feat for someone who lost his or her only sibling to drowning. Once learning to swim I swam every day. After showering and drying I would then return home, and there each afternoon following my hour in the pool I gave myself a Tarot reading. This is how I came to understand Tarot.

All that I had learned and discovered during that summer and the years that followed, came flooding back when my child—that child who had been only three and who now stands taller than me—laid before me the three cards their fingers had pulled from the Tarot deck, and asked for my assistance in helping them decipher what the cards meant in the scheme of their life. 

It has been over ten years since that summer when I swam each day and gave myself readings.  Over ensuing years I began process painting, an experience that for many years followed an hour after again swimming.  Swimming, exerting my body safely through the water, something my deceased brother never learned to do, and engaging in the breathing that swimming requires, has always, and still remains a very healing experience for me. Incidentally, while my father was an experienced swimmer, my mother remained terrified of the water throughout her life.

My learning to swim was a major part of my individuation process toward becoming the person I was destined to be, my experience of connecting with the person inside me that I had hidden for over three decades. That my child felt the freedom and the safety to ask me to assist them in their attempt to come to know who they are, uncover their identity—that child who is now a teenager—touched me immensely.

Upon sharing my knowledge with them—what I knew of the meanings each card held and symbolized, we then together referred to the book that accompanied this set of Tarot cards.  And so the learning began again. But this time with a knowledge and wisdom I did not possess a decade and a half ago.

 While examining the cards, and then the two of us reading the meanings the accompanying text attached to each card, I began to see my child in a whole new light—not one that shattered or threatening our past, rather a here-and-now experience adding substance and stature, and grounding our relationship, as my child moves into young adulthood.

It was a creative moment. One in which I, having surrendered to a child’s request, came to not only see that child in greater depth and emotional texture, but also wherein my own past and present came into clearer view.

For that I am thankful. And also for the fodder of real life experience that gave me a subject and focus for writing this blog.

The artist, while committed to her or his mission of creating, must never remain so focused on their work that she or he forgets the existence of those closest to them. We must never lose the ability to surrender to the needs of those living with with us and in our care--individuals whose very lives attach purpose and meaning to our life and work as artists whose work mirrors life, hopes and dreams.

For in these persons—our friends and family—lay the greatest of ideas and the inspiration for what we will create.