
By guest blogger Emily K. Grieves
I am in the final days of finishing up 21 paintings for a solo exhibit of my work at the Museo Gonzalo Carrasco at the Casa de Cultura in nearby Otumba. It’s a huge deal for me. I only ever had a solo show once before, at the lovely Art House Gallery in San Francisco when fellow guest-blogger Mary Swanson kindly gave me the opportunity back in 2003. It rocked my world, set a fire under my butt, made me think outside the box, and I was so proud of the completed show even as I imploded from the tightly held container of so much creation closing at the end of it. Then I moved to Mexico, painted on walls, and studied so much Teotihuacano imagery and Catholic religious art that I was no longer sure of what I wanted to paint or how to paint it.
A big period of limbo began where, sure, I painted lots of little things to sell, but nothing that really fulfilled me or felt like it had been created in a grand download from the divine. Oh, and I had this human baby to take care of. The human baby took over all of my creative energy and time. Oh, and my husband and I built 2 houses in a space of 2 years … that consumed huge amounts of creative energy and time as well. Painting was this little worm in my brain that ate at me, and I’d occasionally walk past my washing machine, past the laundry lines in the dark low-ceilinged room that is my “studio” and look at the forlorn empty easel. And no ideas or images would ever come. I’d always walk away and dream up some excuse, all the while whining about how “I want to be an artist.” Then I thought, damn it, I have to put my nose to the grindstone, I was teaching shamanic creativity workshops after all – those workshops were as much for me as they were for the dear participants who showed up to them.
The first little baby step to waking up my creative flow was when I had the opportunity through a group of friends (together with our dear Heather Sullivan!) to study Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with Wolves. I never made it past chapter 4, I think – fascinating book but so dense with juicy information that you really have to take it slow, but what I read was enough to give me the nugget I needed, which was the concept of taking something seemingly dead and breathing life back into it. Like an act of magic, you place a hard bean in water, and from within its dead shell a little sprout begins to unfurl with new life. You can breathe life into the bones. This idea inspired me and pushed me to create the first painting of this current body of work I will be presenting, entitled exactly that, “Breathing into the Bones.”
Then on June 12, 2011, my father-in-law’s father passed away, and I swear his soul arranged this set-up where the gallery director of the Casa de Cultura sat down next to me at the wake. It must have been about midnight or so, because the rosaries were over and everyone was just sitting in the presence of the casket, chatting quietly and sipping coffee to pass the time. The director and I got to talking about a lot of interesting things and he asked me if I would be interested in doing a solo show. I said, gulp, “sure,” in my insecure little “I’m not a real artist” voice. He said, great, it’ll be in February. Oh wonderful, plenty of time to paint 21 paintings. I think I waited until about Sept. to get started, and the less time I’ve had as the calendar days tick by the more productive I’ve become – fascinating how that happens! And fascinating how a sad event like a wake could give life to me, breathing into the bones of my creative self in the presence of a very real death.
In July, not long after the wake, two things happened that solidified my “artistness” and eventual capacity to bust out these paintings. The first was that my husband gave me a great piece of furniture for my studio, a big cupboard to store all of my supplies that had been on the floor in cardboard boxes. This awesome gift motivated me to organize the studio, clean it up, hang curtains dividing the room between laundry room and studio, and generally gave me the thumbs-up from my husband – we all need a little nudge, a little “it’s ok” from our partners to boost our confidence sometimes. The second thing that happened was a Shamanic Creativity journey I led here in Teo with my friend Iva Peele, which was majorly creatively juicy, and I had an “a-ha” moment during it holding up 2 special crystals that one of the participants had just given me, when all the images “downloaded” into me. I just knew it was what had happened. Sounds kind of science fiction (or fantasy!) but I truly knew that all the images came streaming out of wherever images come from (God, Life, Light, the Heart of Creation) through the crystals and into me simply because I put the intention out there for it and asked for the images. Ask and ye shall receive. I couldn’t have told you in the moment what the images were but I knew they were in me now, and I would one by one be able to bring them into life and into being. And that is exactly what happened. Now when I’d go into the studio, things began to flow, I’d see the image forming on the canvas almost as soon as I’d start. As soon as I would come close to finishing one canvas, I’d start to get the image for the next one. I’d lie in bed at night, and I’d see the finished piece I’d work on the next day.
So now I am days away from taking the pieces to the museum for their installation, and I’ve been pulling weeks of all-nighters to finish on time. But fatigue never felt so good. I took about half the paintings to be framed, a luxury in which I have never been able to invest, but prices are accessible here and these paintings deserved frames. My husband helped me pick out nice frames because I couldn’t even see straight anymore. When I didn’t go right away to pick them up, the framer showed up at my house with all the pictures in his truck, having asked around the village where the gringa lives to find me. He said he brought them because he was worried about having them in his workshop, but I think he also was so proud of how the frames work with the paintings that he wanted me to see them right away.
I’m not finished painting, but I will complete it all. On February 12, when I am at the reception for the show, a dream will have come true to see all of my paintings hung on the wall, to hear the pride in my son’s voice when he announces to strangers “My mama is a painter.” I will give thanks to all those who made the moment possible along the way, because there are many. I will also thank myself for a moment, take a moment to be proud of myself, to acknowledge that I persisted, that I kept at it, that I pushed myself those late nights, that I went for it, that yes, I could breathe into the bones and bring them back to life. I think this moves me because it means we all can. If I can do it, you can do it, we all can bring dead bones back to life. There is hope. We don’t have to ever give up. And even if those paintings just have a public life for three weeks and never see the walls of a gallery ever again, it still will have been worth it, because I love each one like a baby for the mere fact that it took a breath of life.
Image: The Queen of Heaven, Acrylic on canvas, Emily K. Grieves, 2012 (you may remember my photo from last month’s blog … gratitude to my model, hoping to have honored you by breathing life back into your bones and feathers …)
The Chinese New Year of the Water Dragon begins January 23rd, 2012















