Art is … not a luxury
This piece is crafted by Sara Jolena Wolcott, using the ideas and excerpts from Diorbhail (Dorothy) Cameron’s forthcoming book, “Art is…” in addition to multiple long conversations with her.
Art is not a luxury.
Art is a necessity.
Art – the process and practice – is a necessity for understanding our problems.
The problems that life has always given us: of death, sickness, and suffering. Wars, disease, poverty. The problems that this particular life at this particular time in human history gives us: homelessness; drug use; meaninglessness; growing old without family caring for you; institutions whose structures are poorly designed.
What gives us the audacity to say is what we need, especially at a time such as this, when everything is turned upside down?
Our experience. The voice of the poor and the downtrodden themselves. The Celtic teachings of our ancestors, sometimes poorly translated. Our beloved dead.
Highlander Secrets
Diorbhail was born in the stark beauty of the Scottish highlands, into a community at Achintore, Lochaber, the seat of the clan Cameron, at the base of the great mountain of Ben Nevis, beside the waters of the great lake that curled herself like a spiral of nourishment into the highlands. The land she belonged to belonged to her grandparents, whose parents were gifted the land by the chieftain out of his service to the Clan. Her grandparents spoke Gaelic and were part of the last vestiges of a clan system and clan tradition with its loyalties, chieftain, red and green tartans, pipes and drums.
As Diorbhail writes:
Lis O’Kelly, Tree Protector, 2020
“Aunt Annie would tell me about running home from school to her croft home, filled with smoke from the peat and log fire and the smell of soup cooking on the stove. What an image then, never to be forgotten, to find her chieftain, Sir Donald Cameron of Lochiel sitting in their living room resplendent in his beautiful Cameron kilts, jacket, Balmoral hat with crest, her own crest, and the traditional skian dhu (black knife) in his stocking. There was no need to teach Annie about the difference between the clan system and the feudal system, the chieftain, bearing her name and his presence in their simple home told it all. This was a family system. Years later, at her brother’s, my father’s, funeral, the new chieftain, also Sir Donald Cameron would carry my father’s coffin to the grave at the foot of mighty Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Great Britain. These are powerful images that don’t leave you and that tell us so much about Gaelic culture and history and helped keep the culture alive.
The art was in life itself. It was in the way the men carried their dead. It was in the clan system: a way of approaching the world founded on participation and interconnection. At its best, there was an artistry to our local way of solving our own problems, our own form of governance, before the English came and brought their aristocratic hierarchy and separations to us. Great Britain was formed amid much opposition and unhappiness: we had been forced into bankruptcy.
Scotland gave up its parliament in the 18th century, and slowly English aristocratic traditions began to take over Celtic customs of governance. The patriarchal relationship of Highland culture was broken down. I am convinced this laid the ground for the brutality of the Highland Clearances in the 1800’s when landlords for their own gain, and without connection to the suffering of the people, ousted crofters from their homes and land.
The aridity of the Scottish Free Church, its banning of art in churches contributed further to the undermining of the inclusiveness of Celtic Spirit. Yet, even when I was growing up, I was experiencing a oneness of people, life, land, spirit, art. We sang, danced and told stories at every occasion. Seannair (Grandfather) chanted and tapped out Gaelic songs and prayers by the fire at night. Children at Hallowe’en had to sing or recite a poem for their treat. When people visited it was the custom to ask them for a song, story, poem, often in Gaelic. This bonded us to each other and our culture and made art an integral part of our lives. It was as if we were singing to keep alive our very being. We had a sense of belonging to, rather than owning, land, which made you aware of being a caretaker of the land rather than a property owner. It was a culture that was open to the visionary experience. I had been told and retold the stories of my great-grandmother’s ‘second sight’, of her outstanding prophetic visions, witnessed by others, thereby introducing me to another level of experience. From a young age I looked to my dreams for prophesies and messages, discovering that some of them were indeed prophetic.
I think it was my grandparents faith, they brought an experience of presence beyond the visible that perhaps had the greatest influence on my life. I experienced as I watched my grandmother praying on her knees, her long hair down her back, that she was communicating with this presence. When they were younger they were always involved with churches, but as they got older they no longer attended. There was never pressure on me to attend. They were known for their charity. Tramps had put a sign on their gate that this was a place where they would be given food, a place to sleep and sometimes work.
Seannair (grandfather ) how to confront fear by telling me how he himself dealt with it. He would sing he says one of the psalms. “yea do I walk through Death’s dark vale, yet will I fear none ill…:They were older and spoke about death, my parents generation were involved with careers.This awareness of constant other presence would help me with excruciating losses later in my life.The beauty of the hills and lochs penetrated your soul with its presence, the colors and forms containing memories of the past and visions of the future. I was always aware of nature’s energies and felt I could find life energy there for my own concerns. Never it seemed did Nature go unnoticed, there was always reverence. My most vivid memories are of walking the hills with my Aunt Mary, experiencing the beauty of the cyclamen color of the heather reflected in the loch. I remember a walk with Seannair on a snowy day, and the awesomeness of the sun going down over the snowy hills aglow with orange. There was a sense of belonging to rather than a need to own this beauty. We had our own tartan, song, crest, and cry.
Mainstream cultures, based on having had more power, tend to believe that their way of thinking and doing is superior to another culture’ s way of being, but slowly I became convinced that Celtic culture offered much that was important in its approach to living. It seemed to offer a more wholistic way of thinking and being, and included significant pieces that are missing in a culture whose mindset and intention is Empire building. There were profound truths contained in my Gaelic culture which have guided me, have influenced my art and work with people, and is the source of my joy. Later I would come to view the music, dance, colours, traditions, as art’s answers in defence of a country whose identity was being bombarded. Musicians, poets, painters have all brought us messages of transformation and insight in the midst of chaos and violence.
This, however, this powerful aspect of art, we scarcely pay attention to.”
Art in Action
It was the early 1980s.
Dorothy had a prophetic dream: the streets of New York City, where she was making her home, were filled with zombies. The peoplewere walking down the streets, swaying, tapping on cars, looking for something they could not name.
A few days later, while returning in the dark to her car, she found that the streets were indeed filled with zombie-like people tapping on her car and swaying in the middle of the streets.
The people were the mentally ill and the homeless.
Across the nation, those who were mentally ill were being shut out of hospitals. It was a well-meaning idea to get people better support than they were getting in mental institutions. But those support systems were never actually put into place. Thousands if not millions were forced to turn to the streets, drugs, and alcohol for relief in their desperate lives.
The idea itself was faulty. It was not a whole idea. Key pieces had been missing in the concept itself, pinpointing the need for in depth and whole thinking processes for the task of helping each other.
The community on the upper west side, near where she lived, reacted with empathy and action. Students from Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, Barnard College and members of Broadway Presbyterian Church collectively agreed to address the most visible need of these homeless gathering outside their doors. In 1981 a soup kitchen was opened in the basement of Broadway Presbyterian Church at 114th Street in what was, at that time, the depths of the crack cocaine epidemic.
What started as a soup kitchen and clothing donation hotspot eventually grew to provide intensive, long term assistance, education and training to enable people to recover from the effects of addiction and violence; Dr Bruce Johnson, a preeminent research scientist in the field of substance abused, formed Broadway Community Inc. Moira Ahearne, minister and psychiatric social worker, created the structure. Her own experience in South Africa had shown her the impact of art on people’s lives; she reached out to Diorbhail to include her art process – long before the concept of “art therapy” – to see what would happen if it was brought into the rehab structure. By this time, Diorbhail had already introduced the first program of its kind for conflict resolution in family violence through art.
As they introduced the pioneering program, there was a part of her that doubted. Would art really make a difference in the lives of those who were hungry and homeless?
As she writes:
What I believe now to be a significant factor and which I had not thought of at the time was that in any in my groups were the ancestors of people who had endured much, and who had met the horror of slavery with faith and art, and had created music that changed the world. They understood art in a living way. There was a thirst to move onto the path of art and faith, a belief that it might lead them to the ‘Light’ as they called it. I was humbled by the creative and spiritual power that found expression in their work, and their dedication to looking for solutions in their desperate, difficult lives. Their thirst reinforced my own beliefs in art, that art was indeed the pathway to the soul, and that unless you tap into the dimensions of your soul, no meaningful change takes place in your life. The effects of rejection, abuse, negative life-styles, years of dependency cannot be transformed without that spark.
From the first day we saw the impact of art. People, who were sleeping in parks and who couldn’t sit still or focus, sat and concentrated on producing their paintings. They were no longer the ‘jobless, homeless, rejected, invisible’. They were making the soul connection. It was as if we were giving them the opportunity to drink the ‘water of life’. Through art so many found ways to pick up their lives again constructively. We saw immediately the effect of the problem-solving process of art when a participant jumped up when he finished his painting, ran around the room saying. ‘I got it! I got it! I thought I was successful because I’m sleeping in the park and I’m surviving, but my painting told me I wasn’t successful, and I know what to do now.’
Making art brings back dignity. By tapping into your own deepest, creative and spiritual resources you are tapping into a mystery beyond your day to day existence. Solutions come to you that are your solutions. You are no longer ‘the homeless’, the ‘drug addict’, you are ‘you’ with all its mysteries, complexities and simplicity; all that being you entails. Those who were very agitated and angry calmed down. One woman said, ’These are the only moments of the week that I am not under stress’.
Jobs are needed. Food is necessary. So is a warm place to sleep on a bitter cold night.
But it was the art that healed people, and returned to them their dignity.
Life is job
People coming at me from all directions, asking…no…demanding!
Never stopping, asking why?
Do I matter or not?
Never stopping for air
I feel like screaming, always in a state of idling…turn off engine
cool down fast!
Katrina Libertelli, member, Achintore School of Healing Arts, 2014
It was the art – the very process of doing the art – that enabled them to figure out how to solve their own problems. What they needed for their own lives, not just what they needed to do to receive government handouts.
When we are working on a jigsaw puzzle no one believes the jigsaw is complete without all the pieces being in place. We are used to searching for all the pieces to make it whole. That law seems easy to understand. Yet, in the puzzles in our lives we come up with solutions without all the pieces that together would make a whole? Why are the right laws, the ways to arriving at solutions in jigsaws not clear to us in other important decision-making actions. A work of art offers us an experience of conclusion but also the way to reach the whole. Why are we not availing ourselves then of this knowledge that seriously impacts our lives? How do we miss what art is saying?
What is it that comes to mind when you ask yourself what is art, what is an artist? Often you hear the words talented or gifted to describe the artist’s ability. I find this to be inadequate because it doesn’t describe important mind processes that the artist is engaged in. When we are making art the mind is in constant movement to put pieces of our experiences together, to lead us to an experience of wholeness and completion. The artist therefore is someone who is involved and committed to this task of putting pieces together.
How do I recognize it is a whole, a conclusion? How do I know it is complete? I know by my experience of that moment of wholeness. I believe the sense of wholeness to be innate to us. When we expose ourselves regularly to art the experience of the thinking process, the mindfulness that leads you through a painting becomes familiar and it can become a thinking habit.
We try to gather all the information that together will lead us to right conclusions therefore right actions. Sometimes in trying to solve problems we miss information, make faulty connections and draw wrong conclusions. Art is the experiment in problem solving made visible. Art offers us the experience of the gathering process that includes all the pieces that will bring us to the right conclusions. The act of making art keeps us in the right-thinking process, making sure all the pieces are in place. The conclusions are sometimes surprising and unexpected. They seem to take a leap beyond ourselves.
The practice of art contributes to seeing in relationship and to looking for the whole.
Art is… for everyone, from everyone
Great art is a profound resolution of experience, which leaves us feeling satisfied, uplifted, transformed.
Art was not invented by artists: it is innate to us and has been with all peoples at all times. It is not a leap therefore to say that it must have a particular function for us all, not just for a few artistic people.
The lack of understanding of the arts and the need for participation of the viewer has occupied my thoughts for as many years as I have been in the art field. The difficult experience of pursuing an arts career forces you to confront the issue. The first step to resolving a problem of course is to be aware that a problem exists. If we are not aware that there is even a problem how can we be aware of the consequences of avoiding it, and consequences there are. When we have an incomplete understanding of art we have at the same time an incomplete understanding of art process. If by following art process you arrive at complete solutions, then the inverse if true.
When we use incomplete systems we miss important pieces of equations and end up with incomplete conclusions which lead to unsatisfactory actions. The lack of attention paid to art and art process is noticeable in every aspect of our lives, from our personal structure to governmental structure.
I believe we are trying to resolve issues using only half of our resources. To arrive at satisfactory conclusions about issues that affect ourselves and others we need to become aware of the systems, processes, and models that we are using. The process which creates a great painting is a process which can be used in all areas of our lives. We seem to acknowledge the success of this process when it relates to completing a work of art but remain curiously unaware of the implications of this process to problem solving in other areas of our lives.
To live our mystery we need art, a path that leads to the soul, the whole.
One of the glaring examples of the lack of understanding of creativity and creative process takes place in our institution of school. When there is a financial need for cutbacks the arts programs are the first to be let go.
But children need the space of art to put together the information they are gathering. They need to be able to understand their lives. It is not to move them into an art career. The task is to develop creative thinking so that they might apply it with passion and perspective to whatever field they choose.
Art is necessary for learning – for integration.
Art is necessary for the creative thinking we need to solve the problems our world presents to us.
Art, the Spirit world, and the wholeness of death-and-life
Belief in spirits was common in the Scottish community where Diobhail was raised. Spiritual gifts, including to see beyond the veil, was sometimes referred to as second site. In listening to Diorbhail, it took me a little while to understand that in this worldview, what she is listening to when creating her own art and when creating the space for others’ art is closely related to the world of the spirits.
In the past few years, she has lost her son, then her daughter, and, in 2020, her husband, Tom. The word “devastating” does not convey this grief. She has connected deeply with Spirit during this time. She started to regularly experience Tom’s presence, and began to write down these experiences. While it may seem different from the process of writing or creating a painting, there is something about these mystical experiences of the other world which seems to both of us to be closely connected to what it means to open ourselves to the wholeness of life, death, and the more-than-human world to enter the expansiveness that is possible, even in the face of acute loss.
As she writes:
“It started with my telling my friend Sherry, who was mourning the loss of her mother, that I was experiencing Tom’s presence. Sherry and her mother, with whom she had had a very close relationship, had visited the Great Wall of China, where her mother had bought a Panda T-shirt. Sorting out her mother’s things, Sherry found it. Sherry and her mother had always had long talks every day by phone, Sherry decided to put on the Panda shirt and continue to talk to her at the same time every day, even though she was no longer in the realm of the living. One day when I had had a very hard, painful day of mourning, I decided to do the same. So, I asked Tom what could I do about this terrible pain of mourning. Tom made his presence known. He picked up a book. I saw it was the Bible. He opened it to the Beatitudes and put his finger on one of the Beatitudes which said, ’Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.’
Last night I had a very significant dream.
I dreamt Tom and I were at the front door.
The door was almost closed, just slightly ajar and Tom was on the outside and I on the inside.
I could see him and we were kissing and so happy that we could.
My interpretation: we do have an obstacle but there is a crack in it.
In the seeming obstacle between life and death, Spirit still communicates across the bridge of love.
This dream was very reinforcing, because you can begin to think maybe you are going crazy. But we who experience these things are not crazy. We are simply treading on the bridge of love.”
Dorothy (Diorbhail) Cameron is a Celtic visual artist and art therapist who has been living and working in New York City for several decades. She is the founder of the Achintore School, which has served at-risk populations through engaging with art to restore their dignity.