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
I close my eyes And let the not-body see My body can be found afloat among the houses, tables, pencils, thoughts Emerging from the ground of allI move between my feelings and my pen As if I fly From dream to dream Myself has turned to air. I let everything go. My attention goes to…
ByGiora Carmi
I have not been here for a while, as you know. But I continued to work on myself. “Working on myself” is only a way of talking. I did not work. I watched myself, my inner workings, in the most pleasant way that I know of. It is a pleasant way for me of course….
ByGiora Carmi
Things that I drew many times before, appear again in this drawing. The drawing is dense with shapes, especially on the right half. This drawing asks for colors that will help define the shapes, the background and the background of the background. The first background is the environment. The second is eternity. What are these…
ByGiora Carmi
I thought just now of calling it: birds falling from the sky. As in many times before, many shapes that I drew, not knowing what I was doing, ended up looking like strange animals. I did not think of any birds and no people were planned. But now there is a man in the left…
ByGiora Carmi
There is an upper part and a lower part in the drawing The clouds in the night sky fly near the moon then they freely go much farther They are echoes of the no-sound The earth is always hurrying somewhere but this is truly part of a bigger flow The horizon is a line that…
ByGiora Carmi
I cry For how I suffer For how I let my youthful thoughts effect my stay My feet are burning But Being infinite I split myself to two The deeper wiser me Takes the crying me In hand Look around, I say See how energy makes the trees Do you see How sensitive it is…
ByGiora Carmi
I saw blue. I made the drawing. It is an interpretation, as all channeling is. The reading will be an interpretation too. ————————— The first result: Childhood memories It is a cloud that seems to be everywhere, but more dense, in the kind of density that clouds can create, above me. Maybe it is more…
ByGiora Carmi
The stage workers bring a heavy black chair onto the stage. The chair has stout heavy legs. The workers place it facing sideways. Then they leave the stage. A man now comes to the stage and he is dressed in black. He turns to the audience and bows. You can feel that he is preoccupied…
ByGiora Carmi
The drawing is in dark brown (Van Dyke brown). I invent as I go. The next line always suggests itself. It means that I am in a conversation and allowing the infinite-field draw through me. It always responds to my mood or feeling in the time. And if I allow a description of some energy,…
ByGiora Carmi
And suddenly it was finished. I was still trying to see more colors in the two upper leaves on the right side, as the knowing that the painting was finished started to occupy some space in my being. This also was the time when the name came. You cannot give a name to a piece…
ByGiora Carmi
The lines say don’t Please do not come here We will fight against you The wine says full Says wet Says heavy The green says upward Home and trees The white says open Free and fly All things are watching me But the bird is eying endlessness With no intention. I used to…
ByGiora Carmi
As it happened to me many times before, I was planning to paint big parts of the picture and use a few different colors to help identify different entities or things that happen in the picture.Still with the same intention, it came to me to jump to a different portion of the drawing, near what…
