Wash Brushes, Carry Water

I’ve had a total mind-shift about something quite elemental and essential in the artist’s studio: Paint Brushes.

For the longest time, I’ve avoided washing my brushes. I might have even said on occasion that I hate washing brushes. Hate? Such a strong word. But more often than not, my oil and acrylic paint-soaked brushes would frequently accumulate like dry autumn leaves gathered next to the tub of my shiny stainless steel sink in my studio. Sometimes, with good intentions, I’d leave them soaking in turpentine or a jar of water. Occasionally in a ziplock bag since I mean to get to them the next day. But the truth is, they lay there with paint drying hard as nails. For weeks on end, they stack up and I forget about them.

I also have twice the ‘normal’ amount of brushes, since for the years we lived in two houses, I had two studios, both well-stocked with brushes. So when we pandemic-moved to one house in California, I combined everything like Noah with his Ark, and ended up with quite a collection. With all those brushes, since I’m not forced to clean them out of sheer necessity, you only can imagine how deep under water I can get.

I’ve tried to change my ways! I’ve even tried to micro-manage myself into obedience. I’d put “clean brushes” as a line-item on my to-do list, endeavoring to motivate myself into a routine studio cleanup on Fridays, telling myself how happy I’ll be when I have all clean brushes on a Monday morning. But Friday comes and goes and the dirty brushes remain. The fact is, it’s just not fun to clean brushes. I’d rather spend my precious studio time creating, painting, and exploring the new.

So what happened? What was the shift? It had to do with time. And making a decision. One late-afternoon, I had run out of time to have a full-fledged studio session. But I had one hour and I wanted to have something to show for it. Something that would serve my painting that I had slated for the next day. So I decide to put on a friend’s podcast that I hadn’t yet had time to listen to. And I decided to wash my brushes while I listened.

It was pure magic. I donned my rubber gloves and turned on the faucet, and started one by one lathering the bristles and massaging them in the palm of my hand, and rinsing them ’til the water ran clean, gently smoothing the brushes and placing each one - one next to the other - on a clean towel to dry. I was totally absorbed in cleaning the brushes. I began to enjoy each brush for its uniqueness, noticing the color that lathered up as I remembering which painting begat that particular shade of paint. It was a visual treat. A gift for my busy mind to slow down and let my hands take the reins for a while. Suddenly, cleaning brushes became a meditation. A respite from that all-to-common daily life where I’m constantly pushing to get more done. But I was actually doing it now. Fully awake and aware and I was in heaven.

I was also totally present for my friend’s podcast. Rather than listening to it in stops and starts, 20 minutes here when I jump in the car for a quick errand, and 30 minutes there while I cook dinner, I experienced the entirety of my friend’s creation. I was open and porous - to better to receive her message and her insights. It went deeper in me. And isn't that what matters? The way we want to live? To actually be available for our lives while we are living them. To be touched by the food of our impressions, the media and music and movies that we so carefully curate, in-order to actually feed our souls and fill our inner wells with substance.

The next day, when I walked in to my studio - I felt joy and excitement - eager to pick up again with paintings I’d been working on. I turned on the lights and lit a candle. And before me was a full orchestra of clean brushes standing at attention, as if awaiting the arrival of the concert mistress, poised for her to play the first note. I was prepared to serve the gift - to open myself to the creative spirit and allow it to flow through me.

Now, amazingly enough, I love cleaning brushes! I look forward to my brush cleaning sessions. They never stack up and sometimes for fun I even just clean a few - like dropping into a short cat-cow series to warm up the body - for that same feeling of aliveness.

It is rare that we do what we are doing while we are doing it. But when we do - it ceases to become a chore - and becomes something greater. Something sacred. My husband recently told me about his Benedictine Monk-friend who lived at a monastery high on the hills above Big Sur, and a time he made the windy drive propelled by a yearning for spiritual direction. To his surprise, when he arrived, he found his friend working in the kitchen. And instead of the usual profound wisdom, the Monk wanted to talk about how he was absolutely passionate about Washing Dishes. That with each plate, each cup, he gave his full attention to make them as clean as possible. He imagined his fellow Monk and his great enjoyment of drinking his tea from that very clean mug.

That way of thinking is what makes for a good life. And it occurs to me that I have an opportunity at every moment to look at life from that perspective. When I do, I live in the flow. I feel connected to that universal life force that is divinely orchestrated for us to be exactly where we are supposed to be, having the exact experience we need for our soul’s fulfillment, at this exact moment in time, in our lives.

Here’s 10 of my favorite podcasts to dialogue with your paint brush cleaning or anything else you want to make into a sacred time and practice in your life:

1. Reclaiming Consciousness - my breathwork teacher whose podcast inspired this blog post

2. Life Activated - really refreshing voice in the spiritual podcast realm

3. The Soft Focus - a brand new podcast that I’m super excited about

4. Expanded - oldie but goodie about inner work and personal growth

5. Goop - sign me up for literally anything with Gwyneth

6. Art Juice - two relatable artists talking about creative work and life

7. About Art - intelligent conversations about the power of art and creativity

8. Chakra Coach - subtle energy and chakras, informing a project I have in the works

9. Rick Rubin on On Being - Magic, Everyday Mystery and Getting Creative

10. Julia Cameron on The Good Life Project - Living The Artist’s Way

My Art Is Rooted In Love

“Rise To Meet The Sky” Oil on Canvas, 30 x 24 inches (click here to view in gallery)

My art is rooted in Love. It’s inspired by nature, beauty and the spiritual experience but at the root of all that is love. God if you want. Which is pure love. Essence. Truth. It’s infinite and eternal. A never ending stream of energy that is available to us all at all times if we just say yes and engage in the flow. I paint from that place of love. I’ve shared in the past about a time when I was in grief from a deep loss and I couldn’t paint. That surprised me but the experience helped me to realize what I didn’t know before, that I paint, create, express from this place of love within me - my heart, my soul. And that it’s intended to expand and multiply. I’m working on a new collection of paintings that will take shape and form in the future, and that encompass some of these ideas. But for now I’ve been opening up my archives and making available some paintings that I’ve had in my own collection and have never shown before. Because the art only works if I share it. It’s like completing a circle. This process that I engage in when I paint and channel the creative spirit, essentially love, is meant to radiate out and be received. Creating in that flow when I am in a studio session and I lose myself and then ‘come back up’, is my favorite part of painting. That experience of spirit and oneness with all that is becomes imbued in the painting. It’s contained in the art. The painting has the power to transmit that energy. The painting becomes a vehicle for spiritual awakening. To raise the vibration of one who engages with the painting, observing it, sharing space with it, and it goes out from there. From one human to another, out in our world. Like a the rings that radiate out from a pebble dropped into the water of a still pond, the effect of the art ripples out to share that love that I made the paintings in and from - that awareness and experience of love eternal, The Great Reality of Life.

“Feeling Part Of It All” oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches (click here to view in gallery)

INSIDE THE ART: "My Soul Is In The Sky"

“My Soul Is In The Sky” - William Shakespeare

This painting is inspired by the deep feeling of connectedness that we feel when we stand in awe under a sunset sky.

Acrylic on Canvas

30 x 24 inches

In thinking about the title of this painting, “My Soul Is In The Sky,” I started thinking about what that really means. For me, the sky has always been a source of spiritual connection. In my daily life, I often look to the clouds for inspiration, guidance, affirmation. It is one of the places I can find myself, simply by stopping wherever my feet are, and looking up. So often we get caught up in the hustle and bustle of life. And many of us are familiar with that experience of the power of nature, where for a moment we stop to really look closely at a flower blossom, or deeply breathe in the scent of the sea air, or immerse ourselves in a nature walk where we are transported physically and psychically to out of our daily reality and into another realm for a short time. In that moment when I may have feel lost from myself or my source, I can look up, and instantly find my soul again. Like a look from above, that in touching that other realm, I am brought back to the truth. The sky is not unlike a mirror, but where a mirror is only a reflection of the outer, physical self, or even the external characteristics of the personality, I think the sky can be like a spiritual mirror - where that can reflect back to us our true self, our soul, the special part in us that is essentially of same substance as the divine. In that moment, I remember myself - that essential nature of what makes me me. There is a poem by Rilke that reminds me of this experience. In the line where he writes “it seems like things are more like me now”, it’s almost like he is saying “it seems the sky is more like me now”.

Moving Forward

by Rainer Maria Rilke

The deep parts of my life pour onward,


as if the river shores were opening out.


It seems that things are more like me now,

that I can see farther into paintings.


I feel closer to what language can't reach.


With my sense, as with birds,

I climb
into the windy heaven,

out of the oak,


and in the ponds broken off from the sky


my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

"You Are The Sky"

“You are the sky, everything else is just the weather” - Pema Chodron

Inspired by this quote by Pema Chodron, I’m preparing a collection of abstract skyscapes for an exhibition in Scottsdale AZ, Spring, 2020.

The Road Home: Discovering Belonging In My Search For Place

The Road Home:
Discovering belonging in my search for place
by Lisa G.P. Miller

Shakespeare’s famous play begins “Two households, both alike…”, an age-old story of young lovers and their tragic demise. But unlike those star-crossed lovers, my husband and I were destiny’s darlings, brought together quickly and powerfully as we embarked on creating a life together. And as we said yes to each other and all of life’s possibilities, I said yes to living in two homes that had been my husband’s life before me - one in the desert in Arizona and one by the ocean in California. And we were blissfully at home in our two households.

Until then, I had spent the majority of my adult life creating a home in the Western United States. After growing up in the East, I left my parent’s home in Pittsburgh for college in New York. Upon graduation, I set out for a new life in Taos, New Mexico and later moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I built a business and bought my first home.

However, in all the moving and sinking down of roots through my twenties and thirties, I discovered the profound truth that Maya Angelou so beautifully describes:  “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” For me, home is in the deepest sense a place of quiet and stillness, both physical and spiritual, where the heart finds rest.

My husband, John, and I have two of those places! And it is divine. Our home in the desert is an old adobe nestled amongst towering trees and old growth cactus. It is patrolled by hawks and populated by wild rabbits, quail, coyotes and a bobcat. Just being there, the hectic world outside gives way to reflection and contemplation. We have a cook’s kitchen and five beehive fireplaces where from the logs of our mesquite forest John lights fires with the verve that other people light candles. When you are there, you want to stay there.

Our home on the coast is a cozy beach cottage with endless views of the Pacific. The place is white and bright, and at night the scent of the salt-air drifts in the windows and a foghorn lulls us to sleep. By day, we live not by clocks but by the sun. We swim far out in the ocean with the dolphins. We feast from the seasonal bounty of California’s earth and sea.

Our two homes are both sanctuaries, but are 400-some miles apart. So the fundamental mechanics of travel presented difficulties. We built art studios in both places so that I could work seamlessly as we moved, and we have carried many things back and forth while driving across state lines. But sometimes, I would be reaching for a favorite paint brush while in California and realize it was in Arizona. Or I’d get frustrated looking for that particular Joan Mitchell book that I wanted for inspiration and couldn't put my hands on. Maintaining a small business selling art also creates logistical problems when the inventory is split between two locations so far apart. I began shopping in duplicate not only for art materials, but items like jeans and toothpaste, buying everything ‘two by two’, as if I was Noah preparing the Ark.

Even so, the reality is you can’t be two places at once. The movement between homes became unsettling. I began to feel if there were shifting sands beneath my feet, and an uneasiness grew in me. I started to question myself: Where do I feel at home? Where am I more creative? Where do I belong? I lost my perspective and instead of having two homes, I felt like we had none. It was an illusion, but nonetheless perplexing.

What to do? When in doubt, consult Rumi, who told me: “Each day we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t go into the library and read. Take down your instrument and play. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”

So in the spirit of the Persian poet, John and I set out on a pilgrimage to kiss the California coastline. We decided to start just North of San Francisco and explore by car, driving as far as we desired to go. We had blankets and picnic baskets and a desire for high adventure. I brought painting supplies and sketchbooks; he brought a classic Hasselblad camera. For two weeks, we traveled slowly and deliberately to take it all in. It transformed us as we followed the contours of the land at the edge of the ocean.

We had wonder and time. Beauty led us on. As Joan Didion writes in her memoir of a similar trip with her husband John, “We went wherever the day took us.” As we drove along, sunlight and lifting fog revealed the path ahead. Wondrous things captured our attention. Small towns like Elk with only a general store had an unconventional charm. At the Sea Ranch, a family of deer grazed in the grass, staring at us silently from their home outside our window. We watched each other for hours as we settled into our home for the night. On the Mendocino Coast, we were captivated by two sea lions sleeping on a rock who awoke as the tide came in. Waves rolled over their stony and ephemeral home, gently carrying them back to their home in the sea. A few days later at the glorious Point Arena, as we picnicked on a blanket nestled low in a field of tall palomino grass, a father and son on a nearby path peered at us as if we were deer.

We were two peas in a pod, on this voyage of exploration and discovery - very much living the life we said yes to when we fell in love at first sight. As we made our home in funny little hotels and rustic lodges, we had everything we needed. We found a sense of belonging in the golden ranch lands and rugged coastline, the boundless blue sky and places where great rivers emptied into the deep blue-green sea.

It was magic. And as we journeyed, my painting was effortless. The blank canvas was never daunting. An abundance of inspiration came in and my creative expression poured out onto the page, as seamless as sky to ocean. I could easily drop into a creative flow state as we lived only in the moment. Over the course of the two weeks I made some of my best work yet.

Upon returning home to our cottage in California, the concerns from before seemed to have evaporated. I felt different and I wondered “What was that all about?”. I began to move gracefully between both places, with that wonderful sense of being at home in myself. For me, home is a state of being. To feel at home is to belong - to a place, to another, to oneself. To be at home in one’s self is one of the greatest openings in life. Wherever we are or wherever we go, we are free to be.

T.S. Eliot wrote “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” So here I am where I began: two households, at home in both. The irony is that I lost my sense of belonging in the travel between homes, yet it was travel that healed me. What was restored in me was what I’ve known since I was a child. I came all that way to discover that a picnic in the grass, painting outdoors, moving freely in the world - now with my partner - is how I feel at home in my marriage and in my vocation as a painter. I belong to the desert and to the ocean. I belong to my husband and he to me. And I belong in my own skin, as I am, in all my splendor and glory and quirks and contradictions. And this is the me that is my home, my sanctuary, my source of strength from which I live a creative life as a modern woman in the world today.

Copyright 2017 Lisa G.P. Miller. Originally published in Maker's Magazine, Volume 5 "Home", January 2018

AN ARTIST'S JOURNEY

THE STORY BEHIND "POSTCARDS FROM THE COAST"

My newest body of artwork titled “Postcards from the Coast” launches today. I’m releasing the collection in the form of limited-edition archival prints of a small group of paintings, completed while on a recent trip along the Northern California Coast.

My husband and I started the driving trip just north of San Francisco at the historic and inspiring Sea Ranch colony, and followed Highway 1 mile by mile along the Mendocino Coast and northward, all the way into Oregon and then retracing the journey South for a total of 2,500 miles explored. The purpose of the trip was a desire and deliberate intention to slow down in life. We wanted to take time to explore the natural world - the landscape and seascape, the wide vistas and tiny details, the colors and textures, the light and smells, and really take it in and for a true sense of place and what that feels like - Inside - while in an environment of sublime beauty - Outside.

The expedition took more than two weeks and was illuminating and transformative personally and creatively. On one hand, I was out of my comfort zone. We were on the move during the days (where do we eat!?; what about a bathroom in the wilderness?!) and sleeping in a new place most nights. So basic 'survival needs' were often at the forefront of our attention. But in many ways, in spite of this or perhaps because of this, I learned quickly how to feel at home wherever I am. It was grand practice in embracing the unknown in both life and art. And we were able to (much of the time) go beyond those immediate needs to live in the moment where nothing else exists, see examples of grace in Nature, and have conversations about beauty and truth and values and personal fulfillment - what Maslow calls the 'self-actualization needs'.

The highlight and star of the trip - hands down - was Mother Nature. Each day, on the fly, we would choose a place to stop and put down roots for a few hours. We’d explore the area, hiking around and taking photos. After that we’d break for a picnic lunch with a variety of wonderful fresh produced and goodies we’d pick up along the way from incredible local farms and artisanal chefs. (I think we literally lived on Mt Tam Triple Creme Brie from Cowgirl Creamery! and Cafe Beaujolais in Mendocino bakes about 6 varieties of incredible bread at the crack of dawn and if you are lucky in the morning, you can snag a loaf to go that is still warm from the wood fired oven.).

After lunch, I’d start painting. Setting up a makeshift outdoor studio every day in a different place and painting ‘en plain air’ - taking in everything around me and processing it with everything within me - was a wild thrill. It seemed that I couldn't paint fast enough as the inspiration was coming at me from every direction and I’d have 5 or 6 sketchbooks going at once, all in different stages of paint drying and adding more brushstrokes of color or marks to represent something that caught my attention. Right away on the journey, I started painting on these small pre-made watercolor “postcards” that are designed to send in the mail and I had actually brought as an afterthought - and quickly the idea for “Postcards from the Coast” came to me. Over the course of the trip, I continued to make a few postcards at each location we explored and this collection of tiny ‘abstract snapshots’ which capture and express the total experience was born.

I hope my experience and art connects with something in you too. But enough words! I give you “Postcards from the Coast” which is available now. Click on my SHOP to view the collection.

LIVING LIGHTLY ON THE LAND

I've got paint and paper and sketchbooks all packed, and my husband and I are heading out on a road trip, planning to drive up the Northern California and Oregon coasts, meandering and exploring slowly all the way along. We will start just north of San Francisco and spend our first two nights in Sea Ranch, CA. Quote from the book "Sea Ranch...Diary of An Idea" by Lawrence Halprin: "Living Lightly On The Land" was the overarching idea and guiding mission underlying all aspects of the design and creation of Sea Ranch. We've spent a lot of time on the Big Sur Coastline which I find very inspiring and think is visually similar, but not this far north, nor have I been to Sea Ranch. I'm looking forward to it. Our mission is to slow down, explore the landscape, take it all in, and capture and express it in paint and photographs.