Something Appears

the body knows before the mind does

The first time I painted with my hair I was in London. I cut my own hair, always have. One day I put a canvas on the floor, bent over it, and started cutting. The hair fell down onto the white surface. I stayed there a long time, looking at it. It felt right. It felt primal. I did not have a word for what I was doing. I still don’t, really.

I have always been drawn to shamanism. Not to become a shaman. I don’t believe in that, in a person deciding to become one. I think we passed that point in our human history. But we still carry it. It lives in the DNA, in the body, in things we do without knowing why. The women in my family all kept their hair long. I cut mine myself and put it on canvas. Something in that felt like it came from before me.

I started writing in journals at eleven. Nobody was going to read them. That was the point. I wrote for the same reason I would later paint. Not for beauty. Not for an audience. For relief. To put something outside the body that was too heavy to keep inside.

When I was living in upstate New York I painted like a mad girl. Hours. Days. I was also meditating, studying Buddhism, listening to Dharma talks for hours, learning English that way, the words filling my ears while my hands worked. I did not notice at first that I had stopped vomiting. It was not a decision. It was a slow disappearing. The body had found another way out.

That is what both things are for me. Painting and writing. Another way out.

I paint with hair now from everyone. My dead father. My mother. Friends from every country I have passed through. Strangers who let me cut a small piece. I carry them with me wherever I go. I press them into paint. Something appears that I did not plan. Sometimes a face. Sometimes just a color that feels true for that moment. Sometimes it is ugly. Sometimes bloody. It depends on my state of mind, on what I am carrying that day.

I always knew the journals would become a book. But I never felt watched while writing them. I write by hand. What the hand puts down, nobody can read until I transcribe it. The transcription is where I can decide what to show. The hand itself does not perform. It does not know it is being read. That is why it tells the truth.

Writing on a computer is different. The words appear already formed, already a little public, already purposeful. The hand on paper is more like the hand holding a brush. It decides on its own. It follows something that is not quite the mind and not quite the heart.

People sometimes ask me what my art is about. For relief, I say. To be lost in something that takes the physical and the mental at the same time. You cannot get lost in something if you are performing it for someone else. The relief only comes when you are doing it for yourself. For the color. For the word. For what might appear.

I painted for years before anyone saw the work. I wrote journals nobody read. I kept going anyway. And something appeared.

It still does.

Some people say the soul is screaming. Maybe. I just know that when I am in it, I am not anywhere else. And when I come out of it, something has moved.