PAINTING IS A WAY OF KNOWING EARTH

Paintings & Words

Suzette Clough

THE VISUAL HEALING LIBRARY

VISION BOOK EIGHT

Welcome to THE VISUAL HEALING LIBRARY.

Vision Books are a contemporary version of illuminated manuscripts - immersive and written in the language of images. They are created in the alchemical lineage of artists as healers and storytellers of the Soul.

All of the paintings in these books are created without brushes. Each painting is made by allowing water to be the sacred carrier of the painting that wants to incarnate.

I hope The Library can become a sanctuary that allows you to dive deeper into the Original visual energy patterns that underpin the body of Earth.

You can become a member of The Visual Healing Library here. With your subscription you will receive a new Vision Book each month in your inbox with news of online events, Open Studios, including conversations with me and friends about art, healing and spirit.

I deeply appreciate your support through your engagement with my work.

We change the world with our energy and the quality of our attention.

All the blessings and love of Creation.

Suzette xo

Suzette Clough ©️

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PAINTING IS A WAY OF KNOWING EARTH

Over the five decades I have been painting an old truth continually reveals itself to me: when I try to direct a painting to look the way I want, the painting acquires a feeling of ‘as-if-ness’ - a quality of facsimile. It loses the integrity of itself. The felt sense of the painting is that of decoration rather than being true to the nature of itself.

When I allow the authentic materiality of the painting to show itself by becoming present with my own body – a process Donna Haraway describes as ‘sympoeisis’ - meaning 'creating with' (rather than autopoiesis - creating alone) something else happens….

Paintings flow as a river, or as a view of Earth from above, from within, from beyond.

When I stopped trying to paint ‘something’ and opened to listening to the voice of the painting HER body stories arrived...

Guardian spirits emerged from the pigments; rock beings protecting the sacred interior of cave and womb came through onto the body of the paper and canvas, sloughed-off beeswax serpent skins shed themselves as actual living material forms from the canvas to floor.

The Great Mother’s tools showed up: stone axes, cloaks, cups and blankets, star bodies birthing whole galaxies, hollowed-out bones, baobab ancestor tree spirits, mycelial sporic tapestries, intricate webs, beehives, prehistoric animal guides.

The Devas of Earth called out from beyond the veil to trust the original Pattern Creation Ancestors.

These paintings arise as visual pattern-holders of Earth’s DNA, the generative blueprint of the patterns held in creation itself.

This pattern language is the visual thread connecting us to everything and everything to us. The paintings tell visual narratives that remember us into relatedness.

We are all part cloud, part star, part leaf, part fungi, part living soil. Her body is our body, our body is Her body.

These patterns are our Ancestors telling a visual narrative that shares the same language as Her body.

What I understand now is that the act of painting can be an actual liminal portal, a crossing-over place to the multiverse of Creation where the principles of reciprocity, mutuality, and awe reign – where life continues to birth itself through patterns that have visual and energetic consistency with all Matter.

Painting is a way of listening to the voice of Earth – to Spirit, to spirits, to our own bodies, to the bodies of others, dead, alive, human, animal - light bodies, air bodies, mineral bodies, terrestrial bodies, cosmic bodies, animate and seemingly inanimate bodies.

Painting is a way of knowing Earth.

Painting is a way of remembering our Ancestors, coming to know ourselves not as bystanders witnessing our species teetering on the edge of ecological catastrophe, but as activators who share cosmic DNA with Creation itself.

We are made of the same complex luminous fabric as the Universe. Painting is a way to know this in every shining filigree of our Being.

This an edited version of a longer story first published in Dark Matter - Women Witnessing - Volume #14. Available in the utterly brilliant anthology DARK MATTER: Women Witnessing: Dreams Before Extinction - Edited by the inestimable team of: Lise Weil, Gillian Goslinga, Kristin Flyntz, Anne Bergeron

I am deeply honoured to be part of this project that includes so many astounding women writers, poets and artists telling the stories of Earth, spirit and soul in these times of great dismantling, disorientation and repair.