KAREN SILTON, MA
Karen Silton has been a professional artist and arts educator for more than thirty-five years with expertise in painting, ceramics, glass, and mosaics. She has worked both independently and with commissioned collaborative projects such as those with the Getty and Westfield Corporation. In 2018, she founded Communities Create (www.communitiescreate.org), a non-profit based in Los Angeles, California, USA, that offers onsite and virtual arts programs to vulnerable communities. Ongoing and past partners include The Downtown Women’s Center, People Assisting the Homeless, L.A. Family Housing, and Safe Place for Youth. Karen has a Master’s Degree in Depth Psychology with Specialization in Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-psychology (CLIE), from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA, and is currently completing her doctorate there which focuses on art making in community with unhoused women many of whom are also survivors of domestic violence.
Inter Be
(Iridescent Watercolor on paper, 9" x 12")
When sunflowers sprouted in our garden this past summer, I felt a profound sense of joy. In one way or the other, sunflowers have threaded my entire life, but their sudden appearance was startling--not only because of their unyielding and commanding beauty, but because they had not been intentionally seeded by us. They were birthed from seeds who had fallen from the feeders in our yard and took root, nurtured by droppings left by the feasting finches. These landborn suns immediately sparked and connected with my own inner unfoldment. The sunflowers'; outward growth reflected my expanding consciousness within. This palpable synergy and mutuality prompted me to create a series of photographs and paintings as the flowers and I journeyed and blossomed in tandem. Their spiral patterned center of seeds mathematically described by a Fibonacci sequence, became a mandala of swirls moving in opposing directions. In the process of tracing these patterns attentively, I experienced outer and inner processes as one, what Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, describes as the space of interbeing where connection lives beyond form. Then, during the sunflowers' most intense full flowering stage, a hawk suddenly took residence, perching directly on our fence, banishing the finches. I welcomed the juxtaposition of these two images in my psyche, like a merging of yin and yang. The painted mandala, the sunflower mandala, hawk and I became blended into a single sense of wholeness. This wholeness was mirrored inside and out. It was an experience of the ineffable, joy springing from and encompassing the Earth's entirety of peace and harmony, the interconnectedness of all living things.