Recommendation: Carol Jenkins’ “Thoughts from My Studio”

“Still as Glass” by Carol Jenkins

If you’re familiar with the workshops I lead, you know that “not knowing” is essential — in my opinion — for starting any creative project. That is if you want your work to be vital and meaningful. That is if you want to tap into something the universe really wants you to share.

The painter Carol Jenkins approaches her work from “not knowing,” and she writes about it eloquently on her Substack page.

This from a recent post:

Staying open to the confusion of not knowing what to do is clearly important in more areas than art. Reaching too quickly for certainty, for a false sense of confidence, closes off the imagination. Not only does this make it difficult to feel for people or circumstances that are unfamiliar to us, but as we see all around us, righteous certainty can lead to unfathomable harm.

I long for a culture of humility, where we stay open to uncertainty and proceed as best we can--with care and compassion--into the complexity of living together in a shrinking world. As poet Carol Bialock points to in her poem, I Am of Those Who Go Down, we learn by descending, “by sitting at the feet of every one and every thing.” “Wisdom is won through descent…”

I highly recommend you check out Carol’s writings about “creativity, Buddhism and unexpected connections.” You can find her here. To see her paintings, go to her website. And you’ll be happy to know that she regularly exhibits her work in the Bay Area and Mount Shasta; check her website for details.