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The ruin of my effort was far more intriguing than it's realized intent...the sea played with me and told me something about the underlying reality of my life. The rhythmic pulse of the universe is both change and changelessness. Creation and destruction are part of the same beauty. To let go is to create in the wave.
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This Image "Broken Spiral" Elena Ray Copyright 2006
My Mother-in-Law. I miss you Fran. You always make me laugh. I always feel easy with you and I know you get me. Our conversations have gone into some pretty deep matter. Our relationship belongs to us and not the family. We've always had our own little private friendship and we know some secrets about each other. We shared danger! You're incredibly delightfully mythologically beautiful to me. Another stroke of luck in my life....
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This image (One of my greatest models) "Fran" Elena Ray Copyright 2005
A smile like this is a phenomena. In an instant every positive electron is ignited. How lucky I was to be the recipient of such a gift! Love, trust, joy, energy! Photographic proof!
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Tasya dancing. Elena Ray copyright 2008
I know I said I wasn't going to write, and admittedly it has been a relief to be away, but a psychotherapist just emailed me about how she used my artwork to illustrate her site, so I thought I would post her link here:
http://www.womenawakening.com/
Meanwhile I have returned to studying Joseph Beuys work, realizing he is my psychotherapist. And with full knowledge that he is as good as my priest, and his work, his life...is not to be mimicked, or to be serving as an example for me to follow, but that his art is sacramental, it is a host, a transformative mystery.
I also made a large print of a dove's nest.
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This image "A Dove's Nest" Elena Ray Copyright 2008. 17" x 22" Pigment ink on acrylic and Inkaid primed watercolor paper substrate.
I am going to take a break from writing in this blog. I think it is making me crazy. It's not just the writing of the blog itself, it's how the lingering effects of the entries are inflaming my mind. I feel as if I'm starting to go mad. Words are just pouring out of me, into my personal journals, emails, and especially backwards into my own head. I can't handle it. I just want to be quiet for awhile.
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This image "Sticks and Stones" Elena Ray Copyright 2007
"What is to
give light
must endure
burning."
Viktor Frankl
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This Image "Chakra Fire" Elena Ray copyright 2006
It's the most difficult thing to be, because truth comes in...not just the simple kind of fundamentalist truth that makes life seem so powerful and clear...but all truths, all perspectives. How do your process this? How can you stay open when things pour in and pour over, or what's in you is grasped so hard that you feel your bones might shatter?
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This image "Simply Empty" Elena Ray Copyright 2008.
The bird with the broken wing flies away. It will never choose to stay on it's own. Recovery only brings distrust; the healer becomes the jailer. I can have my fantasies about personal bonds with a marvelous presence, but they are only little movies I project onto my own soul as a distraction against my own flightless reality. My only hope is to let go and be one with true freedom. Release and return...
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This Image "Aviary" Elena Ray Copyright 2008. The world as the true aviary. The metaphor as the art of mirrors. A montage of about 5 blurred Lensbaby images.
Love reveals the primordial wound.
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This image "Desert Forms 5" Elena Ray copyright 2007
I have decided that I am going to be a visionary. Maybe I will go out and sit with Bob today, my mescaline mentor...or vibe in with what I found out, last night, are my 1000 (plus) year old Yuccas. !!!!!!! I've got to break out the books written by the madmen....somehow there's got to be a connection between a complete break with rational thought and crystal clarity...a place of wisdom surrounded by swinging doors.
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This Image "Chinese Medicine" Elena Ray Copyright 2006
...the most incredible creative yogic experience yesterday-poured all that creative juice in, deviating from the norm postures with all kinds of crazy configurations realizing later: this is me why do I hold myself back so much?? Why so Victorian about it all? The objectification of me begins with me objectifying me. It's a danger I realize to stand too close to the results after it is done. The state of mind drops away...the lush vivid juicy realm of the "zone" evaporates. It seems the only solution is to keep moving into new zones, don't look back, don't turn into a pillar of salt.
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http://www.guernicamag.com/
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This image "Door To Enlightenment". Elena Ray Copyright 2008. Created with Lensbaby.
I've begun to think of art, for the first time, as a healing process. Could I use art to heal myself??? For me art was first about self expression, and lately, about discovery and process...But now...when my soul has suffered an abject objectification, and that shock has enveloped my entire life choking out all the sacred energies of living spirit...self expression feels poisonous, and the journey but an exploration into fatigue. At first I want to rail at art, in turn objectifying it, reflecting the rejection I've suffered onto all that I'm incapable of expressing; the limits of my skill, my blindness revealed in the margins of my narrow vision. But I cannot get away from this knowing that the greatest proportion of value for the artist in art, is the process, not the product which is past, done, a thing unto itself. And to rail against true process, which is not object, but life itself, is like throwing rocks at the wind...that instead of picking up a camera or a brush, I pick up the petrified pieces of my heart and throw them against my own soul in an interior battle that defeats me at both ends.
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This image "Health Hand Print" Elena Ray Copyright 2005.
At the beach I used my Lensbaby and blurred all of the images I made. The essence of light reflecting off the water and the lines and tones and birds were my only interest...It feels like a secret...I broke a rule...once again I created something seemingly useless, with great pleasure. I have to pause for a moment and allow the clamor in my brain to settle down. What do I do with them? It's done and it has no purpose. Possibly the experience of making them should be enough; it put me in a meditative state, which I assure you I am no longer in. It's times like this that I feel the need to sit at the foot of the masters. I want help with my irrational actions. How do I make them a bridge to understanding, or something tangible? Everybody seems to have a purpose. All I have is feeling. You can't grab onto it. I don't even feel it anymore.
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This image "Blurscape 1" Elena Ray copyright 2008.
"Do not think by merely wishing for peace you will have peace, when in your daily life of relationship you are aggressive, acquisitive, seeking psychological security here or in the hereafter. You have to understand the central cause of conflict and sorrow then dissolve it and not merely look to the outside for peace. But you see, most of us are indolent. We are too lazy to take hold of ourselves and understand ourselves, and being this lazy, which is really a form of conceit, we think others will solve this problem for us and give us peace, or that we should destroy the apparently few people that are causing wars. When the individual is in conflict within himself he must inevitably create conflict without, and only he can bring peace within himself and so in the world, for he is the world."
J. Krishnamurti
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This image "Equanimity". Copyright Elena Ray 2008. Post processed Lensbaby digital photograph: multiple blended overlayers of painted Asian papers and a scanned unaltered delicate washi. A Buddha garden image from my recent travels. I spent a few of hours creating this montage in Photoshop...For me there's an advantage in thinking of myself as an image maker as opposed to an artist. It's much slower producing physical art. I spent all of last year exploring the realm of the physical, and it slowed me down tremendously. I do love the physical challenge of a mixed medium piece. The experiences are enthralling; when you feel it happening with your own hands...to work on the same material for days...weeks, months, its very intimate. But I can't seem to sustain myself solely on those experiences. My heart changes, my brain shifts, my symbol transforms daily.
So I begin this year in an extreme state of melancholy. Surprise surprise. Traveling with my husband was wonderful. Being back home though has me reeling with an irrational kind of sad joy. Home. 2008! To make things worse/better, Tasya, who stayed in our home, left me a CD compilation of beautiful music that is causing a painful stir in my soul.
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"...so what gives clarity comes from the most obscure, and love or it's yearning from the impenetrable, and suffering without end from something infinitely sweet. "
Maria Zambrano
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This image "Peaceful Entrance" Copyright Elena Ray December 2007. Lensbaby photograph of a Buddhist garden near Santa Barbra, Ca.
