Michele CassouStewart Cubley - Life, Paint and Passion

Also by Michele Cassou

Point Zero:

Creativity Without Limits

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin
a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.penguin.com

Copyright 1995 by Michele Cassou and Stewart Cubley
The Painting Experience is a registered service mark of Michele Cassou and Stewart Cubley

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cassou, Michele.

Life, paint and passion : reclaiming the magic of spontaneous expression / Michele Cassou and Stewart Cubley.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-66691-3

1. Painting. I. Cubley, Stewart. II. Title.

ND1500.C36 1996 95-30195 CIP

751.4dc20

COVER DESIGN BY SUSAN SHANKIN

COVER ART BY MICHELE CASSOU

Version_1

T his book would not have been possible were it not for all the wonderful students who have participated in our painting classes and workshops over the years, who have shared their hearts and minds with us while exploring in depth the creative process.

We wish to give heartfelt thanks to Jeremy Tarcher for publishing and editing this book, and for his unwavering appreciation and support during the various stages of its creation. Special thanks to our editor, Robin Cantor-Cooke, for her numerous, perceptive suggestions as well as her willingness to be available beyond the call of duty at all hours of the day and night.

Grateful thanks to Mary McKenney for her intense personal and editorial involvement in the book since the early days of The Painting Experience Studio. Also thanks to Geneen Roth for her stimulating and loving encouragement, to Robert Chartoff for introducing us to Jeremy Tarcher, and to Susan Lockary, Joanne Broatch, Penni Wisner, and Marty Newman for their helpful comments and suggestions. Also thanks to Fella Cederbawn for her insistent vision of the book over the years and Samantha Nieman for her unending enthusiasm in transcribing many audio tapes. Thanks to Natalie Goldberg, friend and fellow painter, for her warm support of our work and her willingness to write the foreword. Also thanks to the students who have kindly let us use their photographs, paintings, and comments; to Barbara Kaufman and Jan Haller for their loving help in running the studio during such a demanding time; and to the childrens studio in Paris that got us started on this journey.

And most of all, thanks to the creative process itself, for its gift of spirit and freedom without which our lives would have been so different.

M ichele Cassou is the originator of the work, through both her in-depth experience in the painting process and her founding of the method over two decades ago. Stewart Cubley joined Michele in 1976, and together they have taught this method to thousands of people who have passed through the doors of The Painting Experiencesm in San Franciscoa studio where people found a warm, supportive atmosphere in which to explore their deepest fears and highest joys on the creative path. Their work has proved to be of interest within a wide range of disciplines, including art, psychology, education, therapy, and meditative practices. Today The Painting Experience continues to grow and to touch many peoples lives, providing a tool for meeting and going beyond the boundaries of the known. The first-person voice in the book belongs sometimes to Michele, sometimes to Stewart. When it is important to distinguish between the voices, the speakers initials are used.

I n 1991, Yoga Journal did an article on creativity. The author, Anne Cushman, took workshops in different creative disciplines and then interviewed their leaders. She wrote about my workshop and also about The Painting Experience, led by Michele Cassou and Stewart Cubley. I remember Micheles photo on the Journals cover: arms crossed, four paintbrushes in her right hand, long bangs on her forehead, a confident grin, sparkling eyesshe was inviting me to paint. And I wanted to oblige. I promised myself I would someday study with her. Then I opened the magazine and read the article.

Michele and Stewart were blazing a trail in painting similar to the one I was forging in writing. It delighted me. I imagined the kind of instructions they called out in class: Pick up a brush, dip it in the first color that flashes through your mind, run it across paper. For heavens sake, dont worry about good or bad. Just do it! But San Francisco seemed far from Taos, New Mexico, where I lived. I never managed to get over to their workshop.

Three years later, I was visiting an old friend who owned an art gallery in Berkeley. I was peering at the paintings on her gallery wall when she asked, Do you want to see mine?

Yours? I said, openmouthed. I never knew she painted.

She laughed, slid open a drawer, and brought out a huge pile of paintings. I was stunned by the intensity of feeling, the vivacity, the raw truth on those sheets of paper.

These are you! I said, amazed. I was looking at her great spirit, the one that had never quite manifested in daily life, my friends innermost being expressed in the immediate, urgent medium of color. It was as if she had stepped through all her judgments and inhibitions and unveiled her true self. And what was astonishing for me was how visceral paint could be. I could write about myself on a piece of paper, sitting at a table among many people, and no one could see what I was writing. But painting was about open-eyed contact. The moment a brushstroke was on paper, it was exposed to everyones view. Painting spoke instantly without words, and my friends paintings communicated not with ordinary images in typical perspectivea tree next to a house with a couple waving from a front porchbut with images slashing through our usual reality: a baby screaming from the top of a moon, green flames streaming from an upside-down house.

You like my pictures? My friend was overjoyed. I did them in a workshop called The Painting Experience. I remembered from the magazine that Michele and Stewart cautioned their students about showing their workthey emphasized process, not productyet my passion was aroused.

What is their phone number? I asked. There was no hesitation this time. I walked across the room and picked up the receiver.

I have learned much about painting from Stewart and Michele. But learning is not limited to the physical act of applying paint to paper. Through The Painting Experience, I have located crannies of resistance in my mind and opened them up. Ive been freed from concepts of inadequacy, from limiting opinions of whats beautiful, from censoring emotions and desires. At one point I bolted from the workshop to finish writing a chapter that had been giving me much difficulty and was suddenly revealed as my brush stroked the paper.

In working with Stewart and Michele, I found I had to give up my idea of what a painting should be: portraying a beautiful scene in a pleasing way. Instead, it is about the alive act of moment-by-moment listening to the flashes of thought at the periphery of perception, and responding in color and form. They taught me what I knew to be true in writing but now had to learn in another medium: that creativity is a process, that it takes practice and intuition, that it is full of surprise and discovery and cannot be known ahead of time.