“The Great Beauty” 16 x 20 oil on canvas by Barbara Bose
16 x 20, oil on canvas by Barbara Bose
A friend snapped a blurry photo recently, while zooming on a scooter past a market in Morocco.
I wanted to paint this lady’s beautiful gesture, captured during a random, split second connection between total strangers – a tourist passing by someone going about her day shopping half way across the world, but that shared momentary instant of eye contact is now a painting.
While I painted her beautiful gesture, I wondered who this lady was? How old is she? What does the long black veil mean? Why was she wearing gloves? Was she hot? Is the blue abaya significant? Her life is infinitely different than mine, but now a tiny speck of time shared has been enshrined on my canvas.
Her beatific pose suggests a blessing – and indeed, I feel blessed as I remember the beautiful truth that actually we are all connected in time and space, wherever and whoever we are.
There is a universal language we all speak fluently regardless of time, place, identity, religion, regardless of everything. We all speak and understand the universal language of dreams, intuition, creative thought and psychic connection. In this state we create our own worlds, gain insight, inspiration, and receive messages from what I call our Higher Selves. It is where we can work out our issues and find answers. These subtle, quickly forgotten experiences have an effect on our actual lives because the dreamworld, where a huge portion of our experience plays out, seeps into our waking one.
People throughout history have grappled with interpreting the language of their dreams and of collective consciousnesses. The dark netherworld of wordless vision has tantalized and inspired creative thoughtful people to keep reaching for answers and meaning. Every culture has recognized and categorized these aspects of life through religion, mythology, art, music, literature and dance, created and sustained by beliefs in their own unique systems. Taking a closer look at these, a beautiful, golden thread of truth emerges. People, and probably all creatures on earth, share our life experiences in ways that are undeniable, not just in a physical sense like breathing, eating, sleeping, etc., but in aspects that far exceed our shared physical existences.
Some societies have emphasized these commonalities more than others. Cultures that once flourished, whose treasures now fill our museums, seem to have celebrated this part of life more than we now do. This modern age is one that examines the subconscious in scientific terms rather than in spiritual or psychic, esoteric terms. There have been some notable developments in hybridizing the scientific approach to these ancient mysteries by researchers such as Rupert Sheldrake, Sir Oliver Sachs and Depak Chopra and lesser known visualization pioneer named Dr. Steve Gallegos. Dr. Gallegos’s work, stemming from the study of aboriginal animal totems, allows us to directly reach into our own subconsciousness through relaxing our minds enough to access and narrate our own waking dreams. There one can meet many inner guides, often in the form of symbolic animals. Together these form a council that address and heal and inform in a deeply profound way.
When I lived in Boston in the ‘80s, I met Dr. Gallegos. A friend from my Tai Chi class invited me to a dinner party the Gallegos home. A visualization therapist, Steve Gallegos has written several books on this subject. A form of self-hypnosis, visualization is nothing new. It is used in therapy to recognize problems within the self in an objective manner. Elements in the subconscious are given form and character which are part of an unfolding dreamlike story, self-narrated and recorded over the course of about two hours.
Symbolic animals and mandela-like symbols appear during the sessions, just as they do in dreams. These symbols have been in the mythologies of all races and are not difficult to interpret.
I am a visual artist. Psychology, theology, mythology, and many other ologies inform my art and sparked growth in my own intuitive, psychic ability. When it was my turn to introduce myself at Dr. Gallegos’ table that evening, I mentioned that as an artist, I have to visualize all the time in order to create. Dr. Gallegos asked if I would be interested in trying his hypnotherapy, and of course I accepted.
The result was a fascinating and insightful reading (I consider it a psychic reading) about my whole life. I aways thought it was, but now that I am 65 and can look back 30 years, I see this clearly. One of the basic principals of psychic work is that you can’t read for yourself. It is impossible to objectively interpret the information. Under hypnosis, however, I was outside of myself.
The story that unraveled is my inner treasure, truly valuable and meaningful to me. I borrowed some of the scenes from my hypnosis to write my novel Tree of Lives. What I wanted to share with you is one of the later tableaus that was not in the book.
“A bat comes along and lands in front of me. It’s here to tell me something. It says its from the ‘night world’, which is part of life and that its fine, nothing bad about it. We go into the night world together. We fly over the rooftops of houses in the night sky. It is beautiful and monochromatic….”
In terms of the Covid-19 virus that has been attributed to an infection from bats, I find this scene both interesting and worrisome. Will I contract the virus and die? I met this animal towards the end of the narrative, though a bit more of the story unfolded where I met a few more animals. In the final scene of my inner journey, I had crossed a big desert and entered a strange city, a new place entirely in black and white.
We never truly know our entire story until the end. I don’t know if the bat represented Covid-19. Maybe it represented my subconscious, my night world. Maybe a new city in black and white implies I’ll be doing more writing, rather than painting which is what I have been doing lately. Maybe the night world is the Other Side, and maybe the Other Side is in black and white, and this world is in color, which wouldn’t surprise me.
My remaining time on earth will determine the meaning behind that bat symbol, but I do know that we continue to exist after life and guidance is right under our own eyelids. And I also know we are much wiser than we realize.
Elizabeth Garden is an artist who uses her imagination to overcome major life obstacles including trauma and child abuse.
When I searched the Facebook Groups page for the term ‘estranged parent,’ there were so many private groups that no matter how much I scrolled, the list grew and grew and grew. I stopped at 1,674 groups. Memberships to these support groups ranged from a few dozen people to thousands of them, with most groups averaging about 1K members. It is a terrible club to belong to, and, like terminal cancer, it seems to be spreading worldwide in an insidiously cruel way.
My experience with parental estrangement is from both sides of the brick wall, from watching my parent’s bewildered anguish at my older sister’s estrangement of them, to being involuntarily estranged from both of my adult daughters for years now. Having grown up under the same but actually more acute reign of abuse and neglect as my sister the psychologist, I decided to never fully cut off our clearly toxic parents like millions of trendy kids seem to be doing these days. It seemed like the merciful thing to do. After all, I recognized them as typical unenlightened old school types who had too many children. So I managed to keep them at a safe arm’s length and several states away.
My family of origin was so bad that I wrote a book about it, (Tree of Lives) but politely waited until they were safely dead to share my tale of woe, abuse and neglect. I even used a pen name so the innocent and the guilty wouldn’t be exposed in an ugly spotlight. But they know who they are and what they did and how they failed me. In the book, I traced what I believe was the cause of my violent father’s crazy behavior back to a massive trauma he experienced as a youth — his uncle murdered his entire family of six (his wife, four children under 10, and finally himself) in front of thousands of horrified onlookers. Understanding this crucial element, which I didn’t learn about until I was in my 50s, put my father’s undiagnosed mental illness into perspective for me. His entire extended family was wiped out and he was forced to never mention it again. No wonder he was a mess.
Not every parent is a narcissist. Its rare. The millions of members of my terrible club are sharing their stories and guess what? The estrangees are all reporting the same thing! The cookie cutter techniques these NC adult children use is the same scripted pop-psychology terminology (we are toxic, controlling, narcissistic transactional, etc.), imposing identical, harsh character judgements resulting in life sentences of emotional jail. It is a culling of the herd-of-origin.
So what’s behind this excruciating phenomenon? I think its a very appropriate question that begs some sunlight. Why would so many 40- and 30- and 20-somethings not only break their parents’ hearts, but also short circuit their own and their children’s foundational inheritances, not to mention elder love, wisdom and support — all this in exchange for false, social media-driven pseudo-principals.
I’m guessing that my oldest daughter ditched me at the urging of her angry ex-step father. Why my other daughter, who has two wonderful sons pulled the plug on me is a complete mystery since she and her sister fell out a decade ago and she has no truck with my ex. In a truth vacuum, there’s no way to know anything for sure. To me, not facing the one person who cares about your more than anyone in the world, and tell them they are being fired is an act of cowardice. This ‘ambiguous loss’ is one of the most searingly brutal effects of going ‘NC’ (No Contact). It’s very much a death, but not something one is likely to discuss with anyone who has normal relationships with their children. And most people do have normal relationships with their kids, making every holiday, vacation story and talk of life’s daily interactions an excruciating and lonely gloss-over. It is the reason why these support groups are so important and ultimately revealing that there is something sinister going on.
As for me, I am an artist, so I paint about this pain. Dealing with the whole scenario is such a head trip that every day I can feel myself looking over a cliff’s edge into a chasm of deep depression. But because I have a loving husband, wonderful friends and a medical marijuana card, I can express my pain onto canvas or a keyboard. But this never ceasing, solid pain casts a shadow over everything which takes all of my mental muscle to ignore. I also worry about what my daughter is modeling for her sons – the art of erasure.
This large painting is from a photo I took of my backyard. I liked the simplicity of the composition and how all four elements are captured in the lower half – reflected sun, water, reflected sky and the ground.
The far side of the pool, at the top where the colors become murky, represents all that is unknown to me these days. My mind wants to fill in what it doesn’t know but without information it really is a mystery.
The act of painting and seeing what’s in front of me is also an exercise in remembering all of the great blessings that are currently in my life, as opposed to dwelling on all that is currently missing. Estrangement is a head trip that takes all of my mental muscle to keep in perspective.
This is an oil and Sharpie painting on masonite. It was a fun and challenging surface to paint on, and actually quite forgiving but also scratchable so it is behind a thick piece of plexiglass.
The lower half of the painting is borrowed from a special shelf of meaningful objects and pictures that I keep.
I found the image of the puppet lady in a very old sketchbook of mine. It is meaningful to me in terms of the title but also an image that we can all interpret in our own way.
This is my rendition of a beautiful photograph I saw in the New York Times by Dmitry Kokh. I painted it because I related to it, not to sell it or rip off Mr. Kokh. We inhabit our life like we inhabit a house, and abandonment feels wrecked from the inside and the outside. Water is the source of life, so the knocked over water tank is just right for this image.
This is a large oil painting about the importance of my new cat Sammy, who is an oasis of love and life in a time of turmoil. My old cat recently passed away at the age of 18. Requiescat means ‘may she rest in peace.’
This large oil painting includes a reference in the background to the Greek mythological figure Niobe, whose weeps forever over the loss of her children. Cursed by the gods because of her father’s hubris, the cliff is a real place in Turkey and has a perpetual waterfall spilling into the sea like Niobe’ tears.
One of the hardest aspects of dealing with a sense of futility (which for me came after the anger, shock, dismay, berevement, and utter dislocation), post-ghosting, is the wish to just leave the planet. (But if I did split, what would happen to all of my artwork?)
Old School – ink drawing news graphic with tape rules and zipatone.
Barbara Bose
If only there was a ‘shift+control+alt+delete’ for real life. We could instantly undo our mistakes, misspeaks and misdirections. We could airbrush away the annoying parts, blur our wrinkles, softly clone or cut and paste better images on top of the ugly ones. Marketers and politicians use these Photoshop-like tools for the images they want us to believe and then we wonder why real life seems so imperfect.
In the Olden Days of the newspaper industry in the mid 1980s,the Boston Herald art department where I worked was located in the middle of the newsroom, in the heart of the action. Part of my job was to retouch photographs with an airbrush or gray scale guache, as every news photo was retouched back in those days. Glossy black and white photos were passed through the hands of the art department to be judged for reproduction clarity. Backgrounds were simplified, wrinkles in clothing, faces and hairdos were smoothed and beautified. Complicated backgrounds and annoying people were painted over. Simplicity ruled when grayscale images were 65 gritty dots per inch.
By the late ’80s, I had moved to Florida and got a job as an illustrator at The Palm Beach Post. The busy art department got a Macintosh SE for news graphics, and I fell in love. I bought my own SE for $4,000, the price of a car in those days.
Once Photoshop came along, my T-square, pots of gray gauche, ink, airbrush and waxy pencils went into a drawer forever. No more resizing a photo without algebra and a plastic ratio tool, no more T-square and tape, wobbly drafting desk, too tall stools, clogged rapidographs, tedious friskets, dull X-acto blades, ripped amberlith, clogged waxers, chipped burnishers, over- or under-exposed stats, expensive stat paper, huge stat cameras, killer stat chemistry or icky scrubbing trays. No more specking type, font catalogs, typesetting equipment, rush deliveries or horizontal drawers full of Letraset and artboards either. And no more companies making those things.
Eventually there would be no more paste-up department and no busy art department at all.
A desert landscape with an escaped weather balloon that has gotten away from a lone figure in a hole in the ground clutching at her heart. Emotional symbolism, much?
