Healing: Reconnection with Our Creative Treasure
“Creating – that is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
The deeper we get into art, the more we sense how creation operates. Our work is then no longer individual – it becomes universal.
Difficulties that arise are solved “through effortlessness,” by circling, oscillating and yet unerring, undesigned and yet precise, full of concentration and yet without any effort. Working in this way, one approaches the principles of the east: “wu-wei” (doing through not doing).
There are universal life processes that flow through you and form the work as soon as you have distanced yourself from personal vanities. Here we are speaking about the “IT forces” that operate of themselves and that create the patterns, forms, colors and sounds from which all beauty emanates. Art again becomes the iconic writing of a world that can be experienced but not verbalized. Painting again becomes the painting of icons, but this time at a wholly different level. Those who participate in this process are actually transformed. They sit for hours in the sun or in the rain and paint as if everything were at stake. We have often marveled at this. They behave rambunctiously and absurdly, as if obsessed, and as if they had discovered something special and obviously very hilarious. This “something” should not be labelled too soon, but it exists.
It is a Tao, a path to creative treasure, conformity with life. It is finding the childish jubilation in art that we know from love. The purpose of the Art Center in Tamera is to give space to this discovery.
This is an edited excerpt from Man’s Holy Grail is Woman by Dieter Duhm.