Kathryn Taylor's Bio

Kathryn's Gallery

http://web.mac.com/KathrynTaylor2

I started painting 2 years ago, after 30 years of writing as my main creative outlet. I had assumed I could not draw or paint because my kindergarten teacher said I couldn't draw - and I believed her for 50 years.Amazing. When I actually started drawing and painting I realized I loved it more than I'd ever liked writing. I liked the worst thing I paintedfar more than the best thing I'd ever written.

After taking traditional figure drawing classes and painting workshops I discovered the "painting process" made popular by Michele Cassou and Stewart Cubley and described in their ground-breaking book: Life, Paint and Passion. This form of painting involves no critiques, no judgement, in fact no discussion of your painting at all. You paint for process, not for product. And you paint anything you want, no matter how ugly or disturbing.

You use good quality poster paints, good brushes and a nice heavy vellum paper. You are free to finger paint, splash, throw the paint at the paper, or use your brush like a fine drawing instrument. You do not need to be able to draw at all. In fact the paintings are more powerful for each person having to "solve the problem" of how to paint whatever is in the imagination - be that a chair, a waterfall, a couch, a pitcher of lemonade, a rainforest, your father, a car, a tiger or a monster.

Professional artists find this process a tool for renewal, but sometimes have to overcome the desire to prove to themselves and everyone else, that they truly "know how to draw". In that sense those who think they can't draw might actually be at an advantage. One workshop experience and I was hooked on this process, coming home with a nearly 6 foot tall green giant/goddess with fire in her eye, which I finished up a few months later at a "painting and dreaming" workshop I co-lead with my process painting teacher, Lauren Vanett. The painting is at the end of this description of the painting process.

In the "painting and dreaming" workshop we had two days of painting and then spent the final day discussing dreams we'd had during the workshop.The combination of the two was immensely liberating and made the connection between the painting and the dreaming process abundantly clear. Both painting and dreaming draw images from the same well. The creative source within us is abundant, renewable, unstoppable and hungry for expression.

In the painting portion of the workshop we painted for hours, gently prodded by the facilitator when our energy dropped because we were stuck (afraid?). And when we passed through the block the hours flew; the dream was again being dreamed in the moment, and brought up and out our fingertips and the brush, and onto the page.

Since that time I've painted in this way alone, at home, nearly everyday. I do more traditional painting too (in acrylics) and find my "painting process mind" translates nicely to the more formal format. The reverie I enter, the sense I have that I am immersed in the river of images coming from the dream center of me, carries over and seems to be linked now to the process of simply picking up a paint brush.

In order to paint in this way more comfortably at home, I've bought a 6x4 sheet of insulation material, gessoed it white and use it as a light, portable painting wall. I have a mighty array of tempera paints in red, magenta, yellow, blue, turquoise, green, brown, black, white and violet, and I've mixed many more colors - a good blood red, a peachy pink, an irridescent blue violet, an earthy tan, several greys, and bright oranges. The more the merrier. Color stimulates ideas and images. Sometimes just the sight of the fiery orange red makes me realize how much I truly long to paint flames coming out of the mouth of the monster painted in black, bilious green, and warty brown. Or the pink sends me into the smell of roses and the desire to fill a corner of the painting with flowers.

Although the pictures you paint can simply be signed and dated and put in a portfolio, I like to photograph them in process and again when they're done, and sometimes invite my dream group to "project" into them as if the painting is a dream. I actually ask for feedback in the form of "if it were my dream..." I've found this useful when I'm stuck, as well as powerful feedback when the picture is finished. Working on your own means you don't have the help of facilitators who ask tough questions (such as "what do you NOT want to see in this picture?") and you can get stuck "protecting" yourself. Having others project into the picture has moved me along. When someone says something totally right for me I have a visual "aha" just as you can have an "aha" in dreamwork when someone projects on your dream); when I have such an "aha," an image pops to mind. I'll know just where it goes in the picture, and when I paint it, it opens other doors in the painting and I'm unblocked and on my way.

Inviting projection of this sort is not part of the traditional painting process as defined by Cassou and Cubley, but it works for me, and I suspect it will for others.

If you'd like to know more about taking a traditional painting process workshop or want to know more about doing the process on your own, just email me at kathryntaylor123@comcast.net.

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