Artistic Development

A Process for Artistic Development

Article by Catherine Jo Morgan, from www.cjmorgan.com -

This is the process I use for my own education and development as an artist.

Self Education for the Artist

At any time there is usually one thing that I’m studying with some intensity. Right now it's shamanic practices. Last year it was 35mm photography – learning to take good slides of my work. Just before that, it was composition based on Hans Hofmann’s teachings. Before that, it was color theory, palettes, mixing acrylic paints. Sometimes it’s a particular technique I need in order to move forward with a piece. Sometimes it’s something more philosophical or spiritual that I need to study.

My resume has a list of some of my past self-directed study.

The Main Process

Always, though, there is an ongoing process that is the mainstay of my artistic development. This is an interplay between free working and empathic responses. I do free working – free drawing, free painting with sumi brush and India ink or with acrylic paints, free forging, or free modeling with aluminum wire and polymer clay. Then I do empathic responses to the free working, to sculptures in process, and to completed work. That gives impetus and direction to the next free working. It’s this dialogue that takes the work forward in a direction that’s true to the Work itself – and to my deep Self.

It’s my belief that only a process similar to this, one that works from the inside, is a reliable path for development. You can’t see ahead very far. It’s like moving through a forest. But the path appears as you need it.

Also I believe that what this Deep Self is connected with the Heart of the World – or God – or the Holy Spirit – or the Great Spirit. It’s trustworthy. And so this small process of artistic development is part of one great Process.

I also do bodywork to relax and open. I record ideas – titles, technical possibilities, sketches. And I connect with guidance through meditation, journal work, dream interpretation, and walks. I free write:

dialogues with the Bowls, (example)
with my Older Self living in my Dream Studio in the future, (example)
and with Cathy on Her Path (example)

There are other guided meditations that I use from time to time as well.

I think of these basic methods of artistic development as forming a Medicine Wheel.

North	Connecting with guidance
East	Free working, gathering ideas
South	Bodywork, relaxation
West	Dream work, empathic responses

I began working with free writing and empathic responses first, as a writer in about 1979. Peter Elbow's book, Writing Without Teachers, made all the difference. Then I learned to free draw starting in about 1983, after reading Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint. Another woman smith gave me the idea of painting with sumi brush and ink at an ABANA conference in 1986. (I’m sorry I don’t remember her name.) This idea was refined into analog paintings of feelings and thoughts, after reading Drawing on the Artist Within (by Betty Edwards.)

That’s also about the time I learned to interpret dreams, from Gail Delaney’s book, Living Your Dreams. I made great strides in connecting with guidance working with Shakti Gawain’s book, Living In the Light, followed by Judith Cornell’s Drawing the Light from Within.

By the time I was invited to demonstrate at the national ABANA conference in Alfred, NY in 1990, I was ready to lead sessions on "Finding One’s Own Way with Iron" based on this Medicine Wheel model. Later I taught this same approach at the John C. Campbell Folk School. My approach was considered pretty radical there, however, so I've only been asked to teach there twice.

Anyone who knows me would laugh to see such a short list of books. It’s true that I’ve read many, many books on personal growth and artistic development. I gained something from most of them. And without my reading books on radical feminism, from Judy Chicago to Mary Daly, I probably would have given up trying to find my own way as a creator.

In fact, a book by Elizabeth Fisher called Woman’s Creation was germinal in giving me courage to create in my own way, as a woman and as an individual person. May Sarton’s journals, especially Journal of a Solitude, gave me a sense of what it can mean to have an inner life.

This sense of the inner life is really the key. The books and experiences that nourish artistic development are the ones that nurture the development of the inner self. These are books that nurture trust in the inner process, and in the great Process that embraces all.

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page last updated: October 7, 2004

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