The Process of Chaos Drawing©
Artist's Statement

The creative process intentionally entered from the unconscious state is a kind of active meditation, a wakeful dreaming that allows the soul self to express through the available media. This process involves surrendering logic, will, and ego control of the outcome, to some deeper center of being. The particular practice I have come to call "chaos drawing/painting" is a ritual practice of just such an art-as-meditation process. It begins with a time of zazen type sitting prayer that flows naturally to a time of blind, automatic, drawing. I literally close my eyes and surrender my drawing hand to my soul center and allow her to draw one continuous line, for as long as she wishes, onto the page.

Once my hand stops drawing, I open my eyes and listen to the image I see. The wakeful dream, the soul image, emerges slowly. I follow my intuition as it pulls detail out of one area or another of the drawing. Never do I see the whole picture at once, always it unfolds, emerges within the natural flow of a relationship or dream. Sometimes the conversation lasts just hours, sometimes it fills days. Even when the drawing is "finished" on the page, it continues to draw new insights and awareness out of me as I live with it in my physical and metaphysical space.

This series of drawings and paintings is called "Chaos" because it relates to that elegant order of the universe that is beyond the grasp of logical, linear consciousness, and because it comes from my personal microcosmic experience of that chaos within my own being. Chaos, as Einstein understood it, is the elegant order of the Universe, our invitation to know the mind of God.