Reclaiming Creativity
I’m elaborating here on a recent IG Live* I did with Meg Brackett, my marketing mentor. The meandering path I took to reclaim my unique creative expression was an evolution.
Raised by a creative mother and doctor father, it’s no surprise I became an artist healer. I grew up surrounded by things my mother made. Clothes, sweaters and scarves, blankets and quilts, upholstery, drapes, plush hooked rugs, place mats and napkins. Those graceful, industrious hands! That taken for granted female labor! The seeming nothing that is everything in making a home!
I learned my mother’s total absorption in her craftwork by osmosis, but I turned that meditative hand work to making art and writing. My first studio was the space under our dining room table, where I would disappear into dreaming or making things with my hands. Having my own space and time to be in the creative flow is still everything. The root of creative practice was here in this mom-made home. But this solitude is not being alone, it’s being all one, in conversation with the Great Mystery.
Above the table, making origami, 2 years old
The way I learned to make art was trying to render the external world realistically. Although I did see books on Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and other visionary artists, I followed the trodden path to art school, Being too sheltered and not knowing myself yet, I didn’t have anything inside to express and knew I could pick up technical skills anytime, So I left and got myself a liberal arts education to learn about the world and who I could be as a creative 4th gen Japanese American woman in the wider world.
The only thing I ever thought I could be was an artist. I sensed it was the most free kind of life with the greatest possibility. At the tender age of ten, I told my father that I wasn’t going to medical school and become a doctor like him. He suppressed a laugh, wondering why I felt that expectation. (The healer part came later.) He proudly showed me a sumi ink drawing of a penguin, an early artistic endeavor of his. Very minimal, very Japanese. My father taught all of us kids some photography, his own creative outlet. In this way I knew creativity was important to him too.
My parents gave me tangible support: good art supplies, crappy but available art lessons. They paid for art school, which led to my hand crafting the education I wanted. Affirming I could do anything I wanted, they also couldn’t guide me to what that would be.
After college my visual art making went mostly dormant. I started creative writing with Natalie Goldberg’s zen practice of ‘Writing Down the Bones’. Timed writing with a prompt that helped me find my writer’s voice and novel characters. Then during a long shamanic initiation, a spiritual awakening born of loss, I learned to connect with the spirits and cycles of Nature. I located myself in relationship to something bigger and wild and ancestral. I stepped into the ancient lineage of artists healers. This led to a drawing / painting I made from the bottom of the page up, like I was growing myself anew. You can see where I added the upper blank page. It was like nothing I’d ever made. I let it reveal itself as I went, in a totally intuitive process of discovery. My first original piece.
Roots & Wings, Carol Harada, 1994
I joined a women’s spontaneous art group and did process painting, a stream of consciousness approach. Without an end goal, not working from external cues, but following what wanted to emerge. Spontaneous art and Writing Down the Bones were about keeping the hand moving, so that the critical mind could not interrupt the steady flow.
Later still I took a Body Portraits class, exploring the chakras and parts of the body and the psychospiritual content they hold. I made a full body portrait, also from the feet up, using colored pencil. In it I had 3 heads!
I carved rubber stamps, and made stamp art, collage, and assemblage. I messed around. I made hand drawn envelopes for letters home. I participated in public art projects.
Creativity requires containers — time and dedicated work space; pages to fill or a specified time to work. Much later in a cross-cultural shamanic training, I did a collage a day practice. Some were terrible, others were great. But the practice was the key, dedicated time and space to let images move through me. Being a Hollow Little Bone. Committing myself to fill the page and finding that collage is my native art language.
This collage from 20 years ago wanted to become a finished print, shown in the mockup below on canvas.
This is the canvas print, a black framed print is also available.
The goal is to connect with others using my art to share love with wisdom, inspiration and beauty. But the process of creating itself is the real treasure. I intend to go back and forth more fluidly between creating and sharing more publicly, as my evolution continues.
*Full IG Live, with all the technical glitches is here.
