Dr. Kim Hermanson

Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs

creativity

Go with the energy when you feel it. It’s not about you.

I’ve been nervous lately. I’ve been holding a vision for the past year and it’s time to step forward and act on the vision. Gulp.

Today I saw the movie, A Man Named Pearl. It’s the story of Pearl Fryar, a sharecropper’s son from a small town in South Carolina, who is an internationally-recognized, award-winning topiary artist (he makes trees into sculpture.) He’s had no training, and worked for a local bottling company for 37 years. But somehow, his passion for sculpting trees blossomed despite all the odds against him. His trees are exquisite, and he regularly baffles professional arborists with his designs. His magnificent garden exudes love, passion, and God’s work. Ah, that must be the connection. The lesson is to go with the energy when you feel it. Pearl clearly knows that whatever art he does, whatever notoriety he receives, it is not about him. It’s God’s work, not his.

I’ve never really understood or appreciated topiary art, and that’s why I know this man is a true artist.

Pearl Fryar topiary

A sturdy, nurturing cauldron

Years ago, when I began teaching, I had a problem with structure. I wanted to have classes that were free and spontaneous, where everyone could express themselves. I experimented with having a class that was a “loose” as possible, but I quickly discovered that completely unstructured classes wouldn’t work. There’s something to be said for having a strong container.

It’s like that in our daily lives too. When we cook soup, we need a sturdy pot. If we raise a family, we need home that’s safe and has a good foundation.

We also need a strong, supportive container if we want to create or express something new.

A container is a foundation, something that holds us and holds our projects. We have lots of them–our homes are a container of course, but also our family relationships, friendships, and neighborhood and community groups. Our work is also a container. Strong, sturdy containers can nurture and support our creative inspirations. When we don’t have a container, we have no support.

In The Everyday Work of Art, Eric Booth writes, “The work of art is any process of becoming concentric with some inherent truth and pull things into some order; it is the process of organizing truth around a personal nucleus.”

In order to “pull things into order,” we need a container.

I like to think of containers as being a nurturing and inspiring. The things that form the container for my own creative work include browsing through art and design books, cafes, art festivals, and fun clothing shops, like (Anthropologie).

For creative work, our container is not only external, it’s also internal. When I attend to and nurture my creative experience.

Creating space for Spirit to speak

I’ve always been interested in the idea of creating space. For years I had a note attached to my computer that read, “Create Space for Spirit to Speak.” If we don’t have the space for it, we can’t do anything new or creative because our life is already filled up. A simple example is writing–one has to create space (physical, mental, emotional) in order to write something new. In graduate school I was fascinated by a book titled Free Spaces: The Source of Democratic Change in America. In their book, authors Sara Evans and Harry Boyte talk about how political movements are formed by having “free spaces” (voluntary associations from churches to social clubs to civic groups) where people can congregate, connect and talk with one another.

And while I’d been interested in how the creative process happens in everyday life for a long time, the research for a metaphor course I taught last spring opened up a whole new world for me around the subject of aesthetic space in everyday life. Aesthetic Space is a parallel world of deep beauty that is already there, but except for rare moments of heightened clarity, we don’t normally tap into it. The research for this course gave me both a language and a way of thinking about what I am now calling aesthetic space. (Aesthetic space somehow seems more appropriate right now than the term creative space. I have also sometimes used the term third space, which came to me by way of Charles Johnston in his book Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenge of a New Cultural Maturity.)

From this research and an intense dream I had following the completion of the course (see below), I came to the realized that aesthetic space does not involve geography or linear time. Aesthetic space is another world that exists parallel to everyday life. To experience this world, we simply need to shift our focus. And I believe this is our future as humans–beauty is what we are evolving into. Social change isn’t going to happen by way of our intellects, trying to figure out a better solution for global warming and other vexing issues. (It was Einstein who said that our problems would not be solved with the level of thinking at which they were created. Carl Jung said something similar.) Beauty brings us into the heart, which has a deeper wisdom and knowing. I believe that beauty is our way toward a higher evolution.

There may be many reasons why a course on the “psychology of metaphor” opened up this new world for me. A metaphor links two unlike things together in a way where we are able to get a new perspective or understanding about the matter. When we are in aesthetic space, we naturally see those deeper connections and relationships between diverse things. And the mystery is–this aesthetic space where rich metaphors and connections live, is always available to us. From my perspective, it’s another world we just need to tap into.

A couple of months after the Metaphor class ended, I had a powerful dream. I was in the basement of the house I grew up in, I stepped out of the basement door into our backyard, and at that moment the dream was no longer ordinary. Magnificent, pulsing, glorious energy was vibrating in everything around me–the trees, plants, animals, but also the clothesline and houses. Every single thing was alive with beautiful dancing energy. I became lucid in the dream at that moment.

After a few moments of gazing in wonder at this sight, my body was pulled forcefully away toward distant forests and mountains. As my body got closer to the forest, I saw that the forest was actually a huge piece of cardboard (like a billboard). There was nothing BUT cardboard–I could see that the forest was actually a photograph on cardboard, but there was no end to it. I freaked out, because my body was being pulled at a tremendous speed and I was heading straight toward the cardboard–I was going to crash into it. And just at the last minute before I crashed, my body was zipped into a train tunnel that was going through the cardboard forest. After recovering from my near miss, I looked out the train window–the train was traveling through a tunnel, but there were some windows in the tunnel, and out the windows I could see the beautiful dancing energy again. The beautiful, vibrating life energy was still there–BEHIND the cardboard. The profound lesson of the dream was obvious to me–it was showing me that what we humans (like me) see when we look at anything is only the photograph on the cardboard. We don’t see the pulsing beauty that lies BEHIND the tree, or the house, or the grass, or the person. Our ordinary, everyday world is like living in a world of cardboard photographs. But there IS something more to see. We just need to wake up a little more to see it.

If you’re interested in exploring aesthetic space in more depth, check out my Creative Space and Metaphor class at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Saturday December 13th, from 10 am to 4 pm. Call Book Passage to sign up.
 
 

Getting Messy

One of my favorite art quotes is from Herbert Marcuse, a hard-to-read but brilliant philosopher. In The Aesthetic Dimension he writes, “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the established reality principle…The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.” Wow. Love that quote. (And I sound so impressive when I repeat it to someone.)

Art opens up another world—a world that I want to live in. And it’s not about the finished product necessarily. I don’t spend a lot of time looking for creative inspiration in museums (although there are definitely noteworthy examples to the contrary.) But in general, the art in museums doesn’t feel accessible to me, perhaps because it’s packaged up behind neat, tidy, bullet-proof plexi-glass cases. My experience in museums is often “dry” (intellectual), rather than “juicy” (sensory or emotional).

In his book, No More Secondhand Art, the artist Peter London describes walking through an art museum as a graduate student. The art exhibit included the works of some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, yet he left the exhibit feeling drained. “We…came away quiet and joyless, as if life had been somehow drained from us. Why?…There was no vitality here, no direct engagement with life, with its mind- and soul-slamming mysteries…It was secondhand art. We left the gallery stunned and saddened, disoriented. How could the best and the brightest be so tedious, so empty, so dead?” He writes, “What ingredient is missing whose presence would make the work throb with vitality and invite us to live more fully–or at least to see more fully–as a consequence?…we seem to have lost contact with the earlier, more profound functions of art, which have always had to do with personal and collective empowerment, personal growth, communion with this world, and the search for what lies beneath and beyond this world.”

I teach many creative process classes, and I always have a student or two who want to see my “art.” Maybe someday I’ll have something to offer them, but for now, I’m fascinated by the PROCESS. The process is what inspires me. It’s aesthetic and beautiful precisely because it’s NOT behind a plastic case. When we’re in the process, we get messy. We get to immerse ourselves in that big, immense dark space of the unknown.