Trance, art and spirituality

What about? Where from?

Writing about my work is quite challenging because I have to think and give an explanation about what I’m doing when I’m painting or writing. When I make a portret or I write a poem I want to voice, to colour with words my inner world. But usually I'm not thinking with my head. I don’t try to control anything, rather I let something happen. There is something pushing me, coming out by itself, which has its own strength and finds its own way, independently from me and my ideas.

During the creative process I don't perceive myself as a maker, rather as a witness, an istrument, a channel where energy is flowing.

The experience of trance has become more and more important in my work and in my life. I don’t name myself a artist, I am rather an healer, and because i can heal myself, i can express it in my work.

According to my experience, we can create borders, confine ourself in a small, dry reality, but we have also always the chance to draw pure water from the source of life. God is twenty-four hours aday available for us. Are we able to touch it?

The point for me is not what I am painting or writing, but where does it come from, the inner place, the dimension where this experience becomes possible. This place is available when I stop manipulating or calculating and I open myself to the unknown with freshness and innocence. It’s like a child’s game, not that serious stuff we may think sometimes. The creative process shows me life as it is, a dimension where my eyes are open, my ears are listening, my heart is vulnerable. In everyone of us there is an ocean inside, there is really a lot. We are not used to look, to touch, to feel, we are afrid that it could be too much. We may prefer not to touch the flow of our suffering, our feelings of separation, our loneliness, our fear of not to be loved.

When it is possible for me, I open myself to this flow and I welcome with tenderness my vulnerabily. Some zen masters said that the distance between Sky and Earth is very subtle. Indeed I believe that we don’t need to go so far away to touch the realm of heaven. The same is for my art.

Painting, getting deeply in touch with life, with the energy of what is there, with the energy radiating by the person in front me, for istance, but it may be also a flower, a landscape, anything, I just become a mirror. Socalled art for me has to do primarly with the ultimate goal of life: healing, joy, capacity to see and understand myself and others. Gratitude without conditions.

 

Gianni Lattanzi