About Wild Carrots

Each session begins with a brief guided meditation that senses us into our bodies, followed by a brief check-in of several minutes for each artist. This sharing encourages intimacy and group trust, and clues me into the specific needs of each person. My first intention is to ensure that each person will feel safe enough to allow the environment to encourage them, helping each to develop their own approach to art-making.

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I typically suggest an activity, a medium or a concept as inspiration, but emphasize that each artist’s primary task is to honor their own desires and guidance. I see my role as a “permissionary,” one who encourages people to develop their intuition, their curiosity, and utilize their fears, joys and preferences. When the “students” ask me a question, particularly about technique or materials, I encourage them to experiment and discover for themselves. I do my best to avoid imprinting tools and technique upon people who will then need time later to unlearn it in order to discover their own path. Since dancing and physically loosening up are techniques that help me to move beyond my own restrictions, I also create activities to help each artist to reach beyond their own normal tendencies by using a host of synergistic tools to embrace mark-making: fingers, feet, scrapers, sticks, erasers, sponges, giant chimney sweep brushes, charcoal from the wood stove, etc.

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Many modalities may enter the natural pantheon of creativity. I suggest painting and drawing with eyes closed, with both hands, and with one’s non-dominant hand. I encourage people to choose the materials, colors, and tools that appeal to them or terrify them right now, since this is the perfect place to start. “Harness your response. You are the main ingredient.” As a result, everyone’s art in the workshop looks different and we all learn from each other. The participants in my art workshops usually giggle when a visitor inquires, “Who is the teacher?” After the first blush of exuberant connection with art-making, some people may feel they are artistically “blocked” or hear a critical voice negating their work. When they share this troubled moment with me, I suggest sensing deeply into what they are feeling right in the moment. Where is it located? What is its color, form, density, texture? How is it moving inside of you? I then encourage them to start again, this time using the newly identified sensory experiences of the blockage itself as the inspiration. The joy to finally explore what is disliked or resisted adds to the process of trusting one’s inner experiences.

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After several hours of art-making, we have tea and each artist shares the day’s artwork and experiences. I suggest that the viewers describe their responses as if interpreting a dream. Owning one’s projections makes it safer for the artists to share and for the observers to develop their interpretive sensitivity to other’s art. My goal for each artist is that they will respect the powerful impact their work has on others. My greatest satisfaction is to witness how people over time discover and develop their strengths not just as artists, but also as embodied people. Two former participants have started their own version of Wild Carrots. In New York City, a group calls itself the Wild Crab Apples, and there are some Wild Potatoes in Northern California. My hope is that Wild Carrots will continue to grow, and that its core concepts of encouragement, appreciation, acceptance and inspiration will continue to flourish into the future wild.