Episode 13: The Process Life

Jan 29, 2015

In this episode, Stewart Cubley talks about how your painting process can develop a momentum that affects all aspects of your daily life.

An excerpt from The Process Life . . .

I’ve just returned from my annual ten-day workshop on the island of Moloka’i in Hawaii. We have an email circle after people return — as a way of staying in contact and integrating back into so-called “normal” life after the long painting time together — and one of the participants in the email circle used the phrase “embrace this process life into all areas of me.”

That struck me, because it’s very much my experience of process art and the painting process; it’s the bigger picture behind the experience itself. On one hand process painting is about painting; it’s about the practice of painting — but on the other hand, it’s a metaphor. The painting process points at something much larger than painting. It points at a way of being, and painting is a practice of this way of being. And when she talked about “embracing this process life into all areas of me,” I felt she was referring to this larger dimension that exists in the painting process.

When people come back from ten days of painting, or even a shorter workshop, the question arises: What does it mean to bring this way of being back into my life? And maybe that’s not even aptly characterized, because it’s not as though you bring it back. You have lived the experience and you’ve awakened something through doing so. The real question is whether that awakening is available to you in your daily life, which has become so busy and nonstop. Is there a deep memory, a cellular memory, of a way of being in which there’s simplicity? It’s the simplicity of not knowing, of being open to serendipity, of being open to the unexpected — and then, of course, trusting that experience, being willing to say ‘yes’ to it.

Listen to learn more!

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