Art & Symbolic Process…
A single seminar changed my life.
Really.
My first year in graduate school at JFK University, in Berkeley, CA, I encountered the creative technology that would inform and irrevocably transform my creative life.
Though we’d been hearing stories from our friends who’d previously taken the Art & Symbolic Process seminar in our seminal Arts & Consciousness graduate art program, none of us could imagine the shift in our consciousness that would occur, the wholesale transformation of our art, or the on-going effects that would result from the understanding of ourselves as human beings living in a symbolic world.
As we went down professor Charles Meidzinski’s carefully constructed rabbit hole, template began unfolding, and a specificity of information began reveling itself to each individual artist, through their individual creative explorations. The course focused our single-minded art for eleven weeks through the lens of a just one self-chosen symbol, and that was radical. Charles Meidzinski, the original founder of the Arts & Consciousness MFA program at JFK University, had created the course years before, and still guided students through the process: a mind-altering process of art as inquiry. The first symbol I worked with was WATER. I am still sensing into the world through the lens of WATER, 20 years on. And I am still actively engaging in symbolic process in my studio, year after year…the single most important creative consciousness practice in my toolbox.
All artists have symbols that appear frequently in their art, and most active artists create series, so that in and of itself isn’t the game-changer. The key mechanism in this case is the amount of focus, depth and intensity, and above all CONSCIOUSNESS we bring to the practice. Also witnessing and being witnessed. That too is an amplifier.
Fast forward: I ended up teaching the seminar at JFK for 12 years, after Charles’ death, fine-tuning and adding various creative processes to amp the process, but keeping the original template intact. I have now taught it to individuals, to teenagers, to students all over the world, and on zoom, and the technology ALWAYS works.
What we are doing with this process is mining the symbolic level that is inherent in all physical life, an attunement and awareness which people in non-indigenous societies have largely lost touch with. Every object we touch, taste or stand on is a manifestation of a larger archetypal pattern, whether the thing is natural or human-made. That archetypal pattern is vast and ageless, and the field of information attached to each archetype has a wealth of information and insight to offer the inquirer. We are also making contact with the morphogenic field of that archetype, catching glimpses of the signature and essence of the archetype that informs the symbol, as well as accessing the field of experience and knowledge and history that travels with that particular symbol.
for more information on Art & Symbolic Process: click here