I have a gift that I discovered in my twenties. I could read art and know how the people who made it felt when they made their art. This gift has developed a great deal since I started working with people to lessen their suffering, using art-making in the process. Today much more information comes to me through people’s art. And more still comes through my own art-work, done in people’s presence, or when I am aware of them.
I used to be a graphic designer and an illustrator. I wrote for children and a little bit for adults. I came to NYC in 1985, 40 years old, married with three children and started a new career as an illustrator only. A few years later I became involved with Chan Meditation Center and studied meditation and Buddhist knowledge with the late Master Sheng-yen from Taiwan. For twelve years I was in a process of deepening my meditation. I had many more experiences and insights and my life changed. After having illustrated more than 40 children’s books and writing two of them, I left this career too and went to NYU to study art therapy.
ByGiora Carmi
When I started this blog, one of the first things I wrote, was about the question: What is art good for? Today it became clear to me in a different way, with the morning writing. Art is a way to experience fully what is usually covered and obscured by our filters. Why is it important to experience…
ByGiora Carmi
Maybe it is strange, but these days nothing is more pleasant to me than sitting quietly somewhere and watching the interface with the quiet space that is always there, seeing how a few moving things in my mind calm down, feeling the body relaxing and staying there. A person passes in the street on his…
ByGiora Carmi
One of us complained about a headache. It was the evening talk on a retreat. We all sat around our master. And it was way into the night. When he finished talking this friend raised his hand and complained. Your headache is just a wandering thought, the master said. I don’t remember what was spoken…
ByGiora Carmi
Did a drawing this morning. This morning was a slow one. I woke up at four, drank tea with milk and stayed in bed, sitting with the backing of the couch’s pillow, and the meditation cushion supporting my head. I listened to Rupert Spira talking for a few minutes about how, after awakening, the allure…
ByGiora Carmi
The knowledge that does not fit in the shape Requires a mouth that is shut for now The joy of expanding Like children in a school break Running out to the yard Is like an eye that is open to the ocean The face that will not be intact any more Collapses because of an…
ByGiora Carmi
At first I thought this was going to be a boring drawing with no emotions, no story and nothing happens. As I worked on it, it felt almost like a drawing that came from thinking. But it didn’t. I find it interesting now. It has a story. The story is whispered. Boiled down to the…
ByGiora Carmi
There is some discrepancy between the right side and the left side of the picture. The left is loose and hardly organized. It looks like something that is falling apart. The right is better organized, but it is losing some of its order by the pressure and movement that come from the left. The right…
ByGiora Carmi
For a while animals have been sneaking into my drawings. My drawings were supposed to be abstract but the animals insisted. And now this bird came. I know what it means. A children’s book wants to come into my world. I used to be a graphic designer and an illustrator. I became…
ByGiora Carmi
If this is a person, then his head looks as if it is planning something. But when you go down to the body, you find it quite emotional. My sense of structure cried out for some stability and this is why the pencil frames appeared, as building blocks that provide some stable interpretation of what…
ByGiora Carmi
Many times I told the story to amazed friends: When you are born in Israel, the manliest man from your family hangs an army helmet 6 feet above the ground in your room, and you have to grow into it. Of course it is not true. But in a symbolic way it is true. You…
ByGiora Carmi
These are nerves, and the flow of life. The dots are the mysterious spots of light on the flow of life. If you take those lights away, the nerves will only follow their usual routines for habitual actions. But when you put the spots of happiness in, the nerves and the flow of life become…
ByGiora Carmi
This drawing (The one at the top) is full of people. All of them are suffering. Their hard lives left marks on them. They are thinking all the time, remembering the harsh, the longed-for, the yearnings. They are colorful in a grey way. Each of them is a story of unchanging, of stagnating, of holding…
