In two days I will be headed to Vermont to begin an MFA program at Goddard College. In the beginning of last year I wrote my 2014 goals with red ink on white paper--I wrote them with a feather.
One of the goals was to take classes or workshops. I have always enjoyed learning and have felt very thirsty for it for quite some time. Late spring I took a poetry workshop series with poet Rebecca Woolf. This was a most stimulating experience, to be creating alone but with group feedback was wonderful--Rebecca even called one of my poems successfully postmodern (whatever that may mean). Taking this class, I recognized something in me had changed. Historically, I have been very distrustful of what others suggested to me. I think I have always interpreted criticism as unjust authority and not as potential for my personal reflection, to pick and choose from, and make my own however I want to. In fact criticism is generous--if it is non-malicious.
With this new found confidence in criticism, coupled with an openness to both receive and share, I ventured onward to more classes at the local Community College. Within just a months time I was sprinting towards the question of
? Answering this question lead me to pursue the MFA--which was a high-jump considering I didn't (and still don't) have a BFA.
I've decided to attach my essay written to Goddard College, describing why I belong in their MFA program. There are many ways for us to see and share our stories. This essay is just a speck of of my education story, but it illustrates a history and desire to be and become. I am taking this next step of enrolling at Goddard just one-day-at-a-time, otherwise I can convince myself why I shouldn't, with a million fears lined up to be heard. Graduate School has been a longtime dream, wondered and whispered about to my friends for many years...as I said in my last post--it is tremendous to actualize a dream!
by Dawn Breeze
Reflecting on my
reasons for attending graduate school--and particularly Goddard--many words
stream through my mind, each carrying uniquely weighted significance. But one word remains ever
present: acknowledgement. This
word doesn’t leave center stage, and as it stays strong in its posture I begin
to recognize its truth, it’s significance to me. It signifies admitting the true value of my inspired purpose
as an artist.
In her 2014
commencement speech at Goddard, Christine Brubaker speaks about acknowledgement:
“Acknowledgement is one very small action, but a very
powerful one...it takes time…it also takes courage. When we acknowledge
someone, we are creating a space for them…allowing the unknown and sometimes
the uncontrollable in. And this can be scary…When we acknowledge we gain
understanding. We seed the potential of another possible deeper connection
where more discovery and learning can take place.”
Brubaker speaks of
the acknowledgment of a person. For
me, the acknowledgment I am making is self-acknowledgement to my purpose and
value as an artist. As Brubaker
mentions, this type of acknowledgement may be scary. For me it has been fraught with doubt and insecurity for
well over twenty years. I have
struggled with the value of art and self-worth, an inherited byproduct of a
heteropatriarchy imperialistic capitalist society that values commoditization,
material wealth, masculinity and normalcy. I was born into privilege as defined as a special right or
advantage, but my privilege is not often recognized by this society’s
standards. As a child I experienced
poverty, mental illness, stigma, as well as creativity, matriarchy and
intelligence. While these may not
seem like privilege to most, they enabled multifarious perspectives and
empathic sensitivity to grow in me. However, as a child I felt cursed rather
then privileged because I was notably different--an attribute which is socially
frowned upon in youth culture.
Growing up, my goal and plan was to escape the cloak of familial shame
and become “successful”. How I
envisioned success was naïve and dwarfed by false consciousness. My vision of success was not my own,
but rather ‘The American Dream’ involuntarily force-fed through social
learning, institutions, and the media.
Success looked to me like popularity, fiscal stability, and prestige--none
of which I associated with art or myself.
Thus, I forsake the deep yearning to know and value my artist self, and
quieted it with destructive youthful folly and misdirected creative
ambition. I turned my willpower in
a direction that ensured being “acknowledged” as successful in the glamorous
world of fashion.
In a brief summary
of my path thus far, I withdrew from Pratt after transferring my sophomore year
from Mass. Art to work directly in the field I was studying, fashion. I was employed with a top fashion
designer and quickly elevated my professional ranking in the NYC fashion world
to that of Fashion Editor at Trace Magazine. My successes in fashion grew quickly to include styling for
editorial, music videos, ad campaigns and T.V. presentations. Most notable was a presentation I did
on Good Morning America. But as time went on, I recognized a vacuous feeling in
me growing towards the Fashion industry, alongside a desire for more creative
autonomy. With sudden certainty my
husband and I decided to leave NYC, and move to Hudson NY to open our own
lifestyle boutique. At this time I
didn’t identify with being an artist.
I still had an underdeveloped idea of what artists were and saw them as
primarily oil painters or perhaps draftsman, with perfect perspective
capabilities. Both of these forms
of aesthetic expression were dull to me, un-alive. Additionally, I still wanted
to exhibit ‘normalcy’ in society with a position of value and respect, which I
didn’t yet associate with living artists.
Immediately, the natural Hudson Valley
environment infiltrated my psyche and I began to feel compelled to play with
paint and materials. When I began
creating artworks I called them “collages” rather then “paintings”, because I
was using candle wax, fabric scraps, and transferred images on to canvas. Because I had such limited studies of
the arts, my work was without external influence; I had never seen anything
like I was making. Initially it
was through other people’s perception of my work as art and encaustic painting,
that I learned it to be such. I
was encouraged by friends to begin to show my work publicly at my shop. As I began to open my work to the
public I simultaneously began to open to the possibility that I was an artist.
The more I learned
about artists and artworks, the more I recognized myself as one too. In 2007, I
closed my store and became determined to focus my attention on my life and
career as an artist. I began a
regular studio practice and quickly gained professional trajectory as an
abstract expressionistic landscape painter, successfully showing and selling,
all of which was about to change. In
2008, everything I thought I knew about everything converted within a 3-month
frame of time. I gave birth for
the first time and my beloved sister committed suicide. The death of my maiden self and loss of
my sister instantly transported me to the impenetrable darkness of grief, a
place unattached to the paradigm I constructed before. This was a time of rebirth for me. I feel this was “The Call to
Adventure,” as Joseph Campbell would put it, or the third stage of my Hero’s
Journey. He says, “The black moment
is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
When I emerged from the
darkness in 2009, I made a commitment to rediscover and cherish my authenticity
of experience and expression and encourage it in others.
The first outwardly
visible sign of this metamorphism was my move away from abstract landscape
paintings on canvas. I did a body
of work titled ‘Bird Girl’ referencing my sister’s life, plight with bi-polar
disorder and death. The new
artwork included performance, installation, and sculpture. These works became deeply personal,
unabashedly exposing the rawness of my true experiences and transforming it
creatively in to art. My life’s
sorrows and joy now became the prima
materia for the alchemy in my art.
I had a very profound and spiritual experience with this alchemical
artistry when I created ‘Free Now’ in the summer of 2009. ‘Free Now’ was an extremely large
(approximately 20’ high and round) roadside sculpture created on site, in a
farm field atop a hill, built with thousands of clothing garments, a ladder
extending towards the sky and a pair of white human sized wings falling from
the ladder without any detected attachment. This artwork was about the ascension and return of spirit to
the sky, leaving behind the material objects that shelled it. Additionally it referenced the Greek
myth of Icarus, which for me describes the treacherous experience of mania
associated with bi-polar.
Around this time, a
friend saw ‘Free Now’ and had recently seen a film about Mongolian shamans; she
mentioned to me that she recognized something unspoken but familiar in my work
with the shamanism in the movie. I
immediately watched the movie and sensing the similarities between my sculpture
and the shamans, I researched Mongolian Shamanism. I was shocked to discover that my sculpture looked very much
like a shamanistic ovoo. After
reading about the ovoo’s spiritual purpose, I recognized that without previous
knowledge I had replicated this Mongolian Shaman symbol. I had replicated it visually in the
materials, in the type of locale and had constructed it at the same time of
year it would traditionally be exhibited.
The week after I dismantled the sculpture a small plane crash-landed in
the same field and the pilot survived, which I believe in someway was synchronistical
and cosmically connected with the spirit in my artwork. Additionally, after I completed the
sculpture I brought a pie to the farmer who had given me permission to use his
land. I expressed my gratitude and
explained to him why I had created ‘Free Now’. He broke in to tears expressing his tragic loss of his
daughter and that he too shared my experience of grief. I believe that this art making experience
for me was most profound because it demonstrated communicating with what Paulo
Coelho calls the ‘Soul of the World’, in The
Alchemist. This piece of art
was given to me to create because I courageously opened my heart to
inspiration. I co-created
something that went beyond my conscious knowledge.
Over the years, my
interests in art have become directed towards this process of co-creating and
sharing experiences of being and becoming, rather then aesthetic
representations of finite moments.
My artwork has grown from abstract expressionistic landscapes into
actual pieces of landscapes. 2011
was a notable year in my development as an artist, as I was one of four
international artists awarded a month long residency in Iceland. I had been dreaming of going to Iceland
prior to my sisters passing, because I had seen a photograph of the landscape
and it looked like my paintings, which were strictly imaginary. I was curious to physically see what I
had imagined. When I first arrived
in Iceland I was hit with a tidal wave of artistic doubt and insecurity, so
strong that I interpreted it to signify that I was not worthy of being there,
that I was a fraud. I didn’t know
how or what I would make with the landscape since I no longer painted
landscapes. Most likely because of
the strength I gained through my previous experience of grief, I recognized my
thoughts were based in fear. I lit
a match in the darkness asking, “What if what others see in me is true? What if I am a worthy artist?” The only way for me to answer that was
to begin being an artist there. Once
again, I stepped out into another unknown experience of creating. This time I began with searching for myself,
reflected in my experience of the place.
The art that I made in Iceland was a process of truly surrendering to
process as art. The artwork would
be the artwork, with the active participation of being in the landscape, and
whatever physical component was created would be more of a remnant of place and
personal history then a replicate of an experience. It was in Iceland that I learned that actual materials told
story if I allowed them to, they where not simply tools for my will to yield an
egocentric vision; instead I could listen their voice and co-create with them. It was in Iceland, in the vast solitude,
that I found my expression reflecting back in ocean gleam, that I found my
sister in the sound of waves crashing on rocks, that I found my artistic wings
in a pair of purple oyster shells.
My art making has
since continued to follow similarly inspired trajectories of understanding or
recognition, post assemblage. I allow
my artworks to become during process, rather then pre-identify what they are or
will be. I move freely between
artistic disciplines, materials, and practices without hesitation. I trust in
the questions and the process to guide the work. The questions I am always investigating are often
ontological and examine interconnectedness, transformation, and spirit--all of
which are reflected in nature. In
many ways I appreciate and am grateful for not having an art education, because
I think my creative innocence gives me the permission of self-discovery without
comparison or concrete learned answers.
However, it is at times lonely, lacking the encouragement of example and
collective wisdom shared amongst colleagues and professors.
This is precisely
why I am choosing Goddard’s Interdisciplinary MFA Program. To continue to reference Joseph Campbell,
I am ready for step 4 of the hero’s journey. I am ready to meet the mentor who “who gives him or her
training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey.” Goddard’s program is tailored
specifically to the unique calling of each individual, rather then cookie
cutting “Goddardonians”. Goddard
believes in the value of the artist, a value I need to entrench for myself. At Goddard I want to learn how I define
“art”, and I want to find a way of clearly verbalizing it within the context of
my work. I want to strengthen my
practice and voice as an artist.
Additionally I
believe in the Creative Praxis as defined by Goddard and want to further
develop mine. I now see that I began
the Goddard Creative Praxis three years ago, when I developed Creativity &
Courage™, a kinesthetic based communications program that emphasizes authentic
self-expression, generous self-compassion, and strengthens individual’s
empathic abilities. I translated my process as an artist in such a way that I
inspire self-discovery, provocative insights, and life-changing self-concept
redevelopment through creative visual exercises. This has been my professional heartwork for the past three
years. Creativity & Courage™
continues to expand and I now teach weekly at the country’s oldest 12-step,
dual diagnosis recovery center. I also facilitate private groups that
run through the year, as well as corporations such as Etsy, the leading online
global Bcorp. Most recently, I
received a cultural grant to travel to Martha’s Vineyard to teach my program to
the local community. One of my
goals at Goddard is to translate my teachings into a book and online platforms,
so that the knowledge and experience of Creativity & Courage™ can be shared
with others in a format not dependant on my physical presence.
Initially, when I
considered returning to college it was to further my teaching practice. Yet recently, through deep meditation,
I have recognized a subterranean truth.
I acknowledged that I couldn’t divorce myself from being an artist to be
an educator. In fact, I
acknowledge I first must learn to believe in and strengthen my expression as an
artist to be all that I am, and can still become. I acknowledge I must truly
believe in my personal value as an artist in order to genuinely install the
belief of unique self-worth in others, which is my mission as an educator.
When considering the
question “what I will do with the MFA degree,” my answer is that I cannot
answer that now. Like my art, I
believe the process of learning and discovery at Goddard will determine the
resulting use of the degree. I am
choosing Goddard’s MFA program because I belong there—as an artist. I know that with the mentorship at
Goddard I will grow as an artist to bring new knowledge to the world. I choose the MFA Interdisciplinary arts
program over any other discipline because I choose to be acknowledged as a
valuable artist who also acknowledges that for herself.
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