the art of attention

“We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see….”
– Richard Louv.

How do we reclaim our intimacy with creation? How might we open our eyes and minds in a way that allows the revelation of God through creation into our souls?

In this workshop Matt Humphrey (of Wild Church Victoria, A Rocha Canada and the Emmaus Community) introduces us to different ways we pay attention known as ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’. Because our society has emphasized the analytic mode, he’ll suggest that we have become fragmented in ourselves and in our relationship with God’s creation – and that we need to repair this divide and rediscover an approach to attention which takes in “the whole.”

Cornelia van Voorst introduces us to science that shows how improving the ways we see the world through art helps heal attention and lead us into embodied mindfulness. Geared to those who might not identify as artists, simple, practical exercises train our eyes to understand the world so that our relationship with creation is enriched and restored.

Cornelia van Voorst is a visual artist and theopoetic practitioner based at The Abbey Church in Victoria British Columbia. As well as exhibiting as a contemporary artist, she practices photography and sketching as a means of cultivating connection with the world around her.

The Art Of Paying Attention- Opening Our Eyes (was) a free online workshop facilitated by Matt Humphrey and Cornelia van Voorst
Co-hosted by Wild Church Victoria, A Rocha Canada and the Emmaus Community (Victoria)
Email wildchurchvictoria@gmail.com for more info or with questions.

lockdown collaboration

How do artists keep in touch during lockdown? How do we keep our spirits up? Over 60 artists in Victoria BC, Canada answered these questions with the project ‘Postcards From the Pandemic.’ The project was intiated and facilitated by BOXCARSIX and included 60 artists and produced over 900 postcards. The cards were exhibited at The Fifty Fifty Arts Collective.
Here is a note from one of the organisers:
Wow! What a fantastic project, successful show and fundraiser. We raised over $3000 for local Victoria charities – Victoria Women’s Transition House, Our Place, and the Mustard Seed, as well as happily supporting the fifty fifty arts collective gallery with the sale of our postcards.We wish to send out a huge thank you to the 60 artists involved for your generosity, playfulness, imagination and commitment to our project. We are humbled by the scale of participation, and delighted by the creativity imbued in each card. This project has been a testament to the possibilities of collaboration, and we are very proud to have initiated it. There are still many cards remaining, and it is our sincere hope that we will be able to find another venue to continue to share this body of work in the future!
Here are a few of my favourites that I worked on with artists Amber MacGregor, Heather Barr, Amber Morrison Fox, Trish Shwart, and Meghan Krauss. (photos of the gallery collection are by Jill Ehlert.)

post card project

abstracted images from photos of roses in my neighbourhood for the BOXCARSIX Postcard Project

For the last number of weeks, I have participated in an initiative by a local contemporary artist collective BOXCARSIX in their Post Card Project. It was conceived as a means for members to be in touch with each other and continue making art together during the time of lock-down.

Each artist would begin a card, and then send it to another who would add to the image and then pass that on until it was felt a small artwork had been completed. Eventually other artists joined in. It took me a while to get going as I wasn’t sure what to send out to other artists to work with, but then realised I wanted to extend the ideas in the “…Persistence of Love….”  work I had just finished.

So I took my postcard sized paper and drew the images of the roses from my neighbourhood onto them. I was delighted to see the effect of abstraction and was happy not only to be sharing my theme with other artists, but to perhaps have discovered a way forward for new work.

Here are some of the “starters” I sent out back in April, it has been fun to see the transformation of these over the last weeks.
Some artists enhanced the rose theme, some transformed the starters in ways that I could not have imagined.

Since British Columbia has opened up we’ve had news to finish up by June as it looks like there is going to be a show of all the cards this summer! Stay tuned.

Some of the postcards already completed by me and other artists can be seen on the BOXCARSIX instagram account here:
https://www.instagram.com/boxcarsixartistcollective/

Until 5 Memory

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I am very glad and grateful that four of my pieces from A Complex Grief are included in Victoria Arts Council’s magazine ‘Until 5‘ which engages with the theme of memory. Here is an excerpt from the foreword:
“In the following pages, there is a surprising array of interpretations to the theme of Memory. Some artists are ruminating on geographic memories (both pleasurable and painful) while others look to the memory of objects through social and personal histories. Memory becomes tangible through stories, poems, and other artworks both lived and imagined here; these memories become touchstones for past atrocities while signaling the wellspring of hope for future possibilities.”
For me ‘memory’ is a timely theme. I am familiar with the personal effect of history’s  generational wounds. These are often active below the surface and never fully called into the open even though they affect the present profoundly.  Today, through the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as enormous turmoil, there is tremendous change being released through the breaking open of deep wounds and long memories.  Wounds that are hidden come to the surface to heal, that is what I have learned and that is what I hope is happening in our world today.

The foreword for ‘Until 5’ includes a call for us to work for a more compassionate future in this time of upheaval:
Here in Victoria, this past Sunday nearly 10,000 citizens took to Centennial Square to protest in solidarity with the global Black Lives Matter movement in support of anti-racist actions.
The killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police officers will have ramifications. Already that city has taken steps towards disbanding their police force in order to invest in community-based public safety programs. This will have ripple effects around the world. What has become crystal clear is that Canada is not immune from our own histories of injustice and so we must remember going forward, together, that we can be better and we must be better.
While we are thrilled you’re taking the time to read this very special issue of UNTIL… we also urge our non-BIPOC readers to take stock of how you are addressing the various ways we all contribute to the ongoing racial and social inequalities in our own neighbourhoods and City, and more importantly what measures can be taken to address this systemic problem.
Take time to educate yourself on these racial inequalities by listening to those who face them.
Speak up when you see it happening, in the workplace or on the street. And if possible, donate to one of the many organizations helping to fuel the Black Lives Matter movement. Remember, all lives cannot matter until Black Lives Matter.

the persistence of love

Sudden in a Shaft of Sunlight, 52”x38” ink, acrylic medium, 2020

I take courage from an idea by Gandhi, which I paraphrase:
Love must exist, it must be powerful – otherwise how is it that human beings survive even with all the awful things we perpetrate upon the world?  Gandhi points out that history is full of news of trouble, hurt and catastrophe, but it neglects to speak of the persistence of love that occurs in our everyday.  This love manifests in acts of forgiveness, of compassion, courage, kindness, patience, gentleness-  often found in domestic life,  family, and friendship- that are taken for granted and go without remark yet keep our world alive and intact.

When I was working on the art that eventually became the exhibition,  The Other Side of War, I would often say, “I just want to make art about flowers.” After that exhibition, I began learning about the German Resistance and realised how much the motif of the rose featured in that story, for example: the name of the resistance group “The White Rose” and the Rosenstrasse protests. For me the image of the rose became the antidote to the swastika. It spoke to me about love being the antidote to violence. It was these realisations that lead me to fulfill my desire to make work about flowers.

By using portraits of roses from my everyday life and neighbourhood,  I incorporated into the the story of resistance, my own overcoming of violence that had its origin in my German father’s experience of the Second World War. It is an underlying compassion that enables recovery and allows me to recognise the moments of beauty and love that are embedded in the difficulty of my family’s story.

The series is called  Meditations on the Persistence of Love in a Time of Disaster. Three of the large panels were shown in the exhibition History as Personal Memory ( February 2018.).  The first six were made between November 2017- February 2018. The second set of six between December, 2019 and mid-March 2020.  It felt fitting to me that they were completed in the first weeks of our worldwide lock-down for Covid 19.  Since then, we’ve had the wisdom of Gandhi being lived out in front of our eyes.

We are seeing  in the midst of fear and uncertainty, small everyday acts of compassion and kindness in quiet and intimate moments between friends, family and  strangers. We see love all around us visibly and noisily expressed through childlike hearts in windows and the banging of domestic pots in gratitude for of essential workers and others who keep our world going. In these small persistent acts we are bearing witness to the presence of love that gives hope and courage in this dark time of pandemic.