Creative Vulnerability

My creative partner over at canvashealing.org called and asked if we could put up a show at the Cafe Cornucopia in Bisbee, AZ. With just over a month to the opening reception date we sought inspiration, swallowed our hesitation, and produced a few new pieces of creative expression. We titled the show "Alchemy" based on the excerpt below. The opening reception was a magical evening of new and old friends gathering together to share in this creative process of vulnerability, growth, and transformation.

Art and Alchemy

"Art was a monumental evolution in the development of human learning. Art, which is the transformation of raw materials into a form that reflects meaning to both artist and user, is equally a reflection of a kind of elemental transformation. Indeed Art, in its highest forms of expression, is a kind of magic. And in this “magic” of creation, the artist becomes immersed within his media and the “mind” of creation.

In order to honor this intimate and sacred relationship, the artist must understand and master his own creative center through patient and exercised discipline. That is, the artist must work with clarity of purpose; an understanding and true appreciation of his materials and his “tools”; maintain an inner harmony and vitality of spirit, mind, and body; and work with a focused meditative attention which exercises his full intelligence in a prayerful act of bringing an entity, a form which lives, into being. The creation of art is an alchemy of process in which the artist “becomes” more himself through each act of true creation, as he transfers his life in a dance of relationship with the life inherent in the material which he transforms into an artistic creation. In each process of creation, there must be an initiation, purification, death, and rebirth of the artist through focused creative work. For in working, reworking, and the suffering into being of a work of art, the artist is, in reality, creating and recreating himself. It is, in a metaphoric sense, “a matter of life, death, and rebirth”. ~Celeste Snowber