LAYERED HORIZONS

About the Book

AUTHOR’S STATEMENT

When I was three years old, I went to a Montessori School in Amsterdam, Holland, the city where I lived for the first 6 plus years of my life. In class, I remember being told to go out to the garden, sit there alone, and write down what I saw outside. As I reflect back on this, I realize what a rich and challenging childhood it was. It is more than rare that a child will be asked to ‘write’ anything at that age. I do remember the experience acutely, and I did write about the garden and the things I saw. Perhaps this, and the later pleasures of discovering word-art that were sparked, made the act of writing as natural to me as speaking was. I can still see that little piece of lined paper, with my words on it. It was in my writing files for many adult years; but somewhere in the moves from state to state, city to city in the U.S.A., part of those files were lost, and along with them, that one essential symbol of my early love affair with words. Because that first attempt led to many more all through childhood, by the time I was 10, verses of rhyme were pouring out.

There has always been a resonance for me between writing and painting. Each expresses an aspect of what I know myself to be. Each reflects a perception of the world expressed in a way that cannot be substituted with another art form. Although the poetry was not put out in the world because of its personal nature, it allowed me to crystallize the events and feelings of intense experiences. It was a passion. I could feel a poem ‘coming on’ and would sit down to write without thinking, often finding the whole poem ‘done’ from start to finish, without pause at any point. This could and did occur in the middle of the night, out of a deep sleep. Of course as I matured, there were also great struggles involved, and even those poems which flowed out so easily were reworked and honed, sometimes for months – even years.

Parallel to this word-addiction was a love of drawing and painting, which started to accelerate in my early teens. Eventually, I would find myself stuck in matters of draftsmanship, and in need of specific, outside disciplines in the visual arts. So it was no surprise to anyone that my first choice at U.C.L.A. was a major in art and a degree in that field; although I suspect that secretly my parents would have preferred a choice more demanding of traditionally intellectual endeavors. I’m certain they were happy when I received my Masters and then my PhD in clinical psychology at a much later date.

Arieti Sylvano says in his book “Creativity: The Magic Synthesis”, that the arts in all forms (as well as the sciences) originate in what he terms the “endocept” or “amorphous cognition” which is the “nonrepresentational activity of the psyche”. This is not to say the mind remains uninvolved in the act of making fine art; quite the contrary. A developed ability to conceptualize is required in all the fine arts; otherwise the results are generalized, unoriginal, or formularized. Formal problem solving, as well, is an ever present requirement. However, it is possible to accomplish a great part of the work in what I would term an ‘altered’ state. Much of it is like a meditation. All parts of the process will vary from artist to artist, of course.

Most of my own work in the studio manifests as a joyous perception, while much of my writing focuses, without clear intention, on the melancholy, the painful, the darker dreams, the ambience of anxiety, the inevitability of loss. The writing probably has roots in a once-happy six year old who was jolted out of safety, traumatically relocated in a new country because of an impending war, and who never saw her grandparents again because those dear people were swallowed up in WWII’s monstrosities.

Poetry has far less of a place in the world today than even fifty years