Integrative Explorations Journal
Lake Erie and My Search for World Beauty Marale Childs Hidden Valley Institute of the Arts (Editors Note: This poetic presentation was originally accompanied by slides of the author’s work.) What is in one culture religion, in another may be art, and yet they may share a common mythical awareness. As a professional artist and first–time conference participant, I am, in a synchronicity with the conference itself, “returning” to my native Ohio. I am grateful to contribute to the conference theme of “symbolic designs as variants of the basic compositions of Gebserian awareness, from archaic through integral.” In this context, I will present my art as “vertically” connecting my earliest archaic, magical, and mythical experiences of Lake Erie, my lifelong search for world beauty, toward mental and integral awareness. My work gives evidence of Gebser’s observations that the arts of the world can bring forth new possibilities of exploring “common modes of awareness.” The central element of my presentation consists of my paintings as “symbolic designs” integrating “multiple cultures” within me and among us. In my earliest life experiences, drawing from the sources of light available, I took up my art in the experience of Lake Erie as it was in that time. The light of Lake Erie was for me a place of becoming, coming to see how light fell, and throughout my life, using my eyes and my hands I have worked through stages and intricate transfigurative processes, imagining awareness after awareness. Through the course of a lifetime as an artist, I have developed my skills through the passion of wanting to see the colors of my heart, to see the heart of a line of color, heartbeats made manifest and held in suspension for soul to view herself. Growing up, I searched anywhere and everywhere for inspirations, for beauty. Surely I knew the beast, the beast of pristine imagination’s desire, making palatable what was death, wanting persisting, needing to believe more than anything, In beauty. Perhaps that’s what a given child can do— insisting home sweet home is wonderful. I didn’t know any better, so I found my art and love at the Cuyahoga River’s edge, blazing those colors off my palette, a painter in the flats of Cleveland, under the bridges, under the now closed Steel mills. Under the face of the International salt mines where I always wanted to go, overhearing if the A–bomb came that would be a safe place to crouch and cower. And we had our Conelrad Alert system preparing us under our desks for war’s flames. The river already knew about war, no recourse from the silent sulfurous golden yellow pollution. Dreaming with her voice, seeing her struggle, with 35
