How Living in the Amazon Taught Me to Listen & Transformed My Art

Photos from one of several trips to the Amazon Basin my children and I took on our own many years ago. This was our last trip there. It was to "No Man's Land" on the borders between Columbia, Peru, and Brazil. Other Amazonian adventures took us to remote areas of Bolivia and Ecuador. 

     Many years ago, while living remotely in the Amazon rainforest with an indigenous family, my two young children and I went for a walk with the dad of a neighboring family. I wanted to learn to identify some of the medicinal and food plants, and as the community's healer or shaman, he was the expert. He spoke six indigenous languages, plus Spanish and Portuguese. So Spanish was our common language, though mother tongue to none of us. 
     He showed us many plants to treat maladies from sunburn, to dysentery, to cancer, and uncovered plants that stored vast quantities of potable water and others where edible grubs hid.  We learned how psychoactive plants were paired and prepared, and that you don't want to be bitten by a bullet ant. He emphasized how each and every plant was a living being with a purpose and life worthy of respect.
     I don't remember which plant it was, but at one point I asked if a certain plant had a Latin name. His response was pointed and humbling: “I don't know that name. You ask the plant what it wants to be called. The plant will tell you her name if you take time with her and learn how to listen and hear. That's the name that matters.”
     Those words. It was a life-changing moment for me. I still think about his healing skills with a full and grateful heart...

New works coming soon

     When I stand in front of a canvas I'm trying to find a way into that kind of listening. The kind of attention that is connected beyond self. Not to explain. Not to illustrate. Not to know. Just paying deep attention to other beings, other places. Just feeling the rhythms and noticing the patterns and cycles and how sometimes they become broken. 
     Because that kind of attention leads to caring. I think about the ground beneath you right now. That little patch of earth. It's part of the whole living system of this planet just like any rainforest or coral reef. It's not less for being ordinary. I ask myself: "Can you pay attention to it? Just this square foot? Can you care for it?"
     Care is how we begin to change everything; from our relationship to self, to neighbors, to all living beings, to the places we move through without noticing.
      That's what I'm working out on the canvas.
      I take a blank surface and let it become alive through attention and caring. Lines that move the way minds move, colors that work together without trying too hard, shapes that hold the energy of a place or a creature or a season. I cover that surface with care. My care. And I suppose what I'm hoping is that you'll see it and feel something loosen, some wee knot of separateness. Maybe you'll find yourself looking at the world a little differently. If you look at a painting and feel that stir, maybe that's the beginning. Of curiosity. Of care. Of wonder. Of remembering that we belong to something vast and alive and worth protecting.
     That longing that many of us carry? It's not a wound. It's a compass. And I believe that curiosity, care, and wonder are how we follow that compass into a life and culture that matches the miracle we're standing on. 

Studio News:
My recent solo exhibition, "Doings and Undoings" is now online and there's still time to see it! This exhibition brings together paintings created during a series of intentional resets—deliberate pauses where I stopped to ask myself: what reveals itself when you stop reaching for the familiar?