Art and Spirituality

A Conversation with Peggy Braun

This is the first of an occasional series of conversations with artists on the rich subject of Art and Spirituality.

Peggy Braun, https://peggybraun.com, is a psychotherapist and artist, most recently a printmaker. For twenty-five years, she has been practicing in The Diamond Approach tradition, a form of spiritual inquiry that engages the nature of reality and the process of spiritual realization. Peggy and I have been having versions of this conversation for forty-five years.

When we met in the mid-70s, I believe you were still doing pottery. What made you move into photography? What happened when you journeyed from the hands to the eye?

I always knew somewhere that I wouldn’t stay with pottery; I knew from the beginning, almost semi-consciously, that it wouldn’t satisfy something deep within me. But it was the beginning of my creative life. The pots I made at first were objects outside of myself. They had big, thick clunky bottoms, but I didn’t know enough to know that and thought they were quite beautiful. At the end of my pottery life, I was trying to work with porcelain. I made a hand-built vase and caressed that silky clay into a set of wings off the side of the piece. It was a revelation, the first recognition that there was something internal that I knew nothing about that wanted to be expressed. That experience became my muse.

When I left pottery, I didn’t miss it—never really have. A friend encouraged me to try photography. At the beginning, it was hit and miss. I think I loved the instantaneous gratification of it, the ease of “getting” what I saw and loved. The love and the greed. But I was very insecure and if I did a bad roll of film, I often stopped shooting for a few months until the sting wore off. A breakthrough came when I went to the Maine Photographic Workshops. The class went out shooting at Vinylhaven and I brought back amazing drek. But I couldn’t stop working like I usually did, since I was in a two-week class—I had to keep going. I had to stay with it. By the time I left, I was shooting at a different level. But later I saw that I wasn’t finding a winged vase of photography. I was still loving the instantaneous gratification of “getting” whatever I saw that I wanted. But I missed the hands. I missed “making” something.

Printmaking started to fill that void. Mixing colors, rolling out the inks, brayering onto plates and putting it through the press. There was always some surprise. On the other hand, with printmaking there was the challenge of starting with a blank piece of paper. In photography, you just had to recognize a subject and then enhance it later. I didn’t know where to look or work from internally with printmaking. In the beginning, I was learning the skills. Later, I was just trying to make something “good.” Again, I found myself looking for the winged vase of printmaking. Over time, I’ve discovered that the art, if successful, takes on its own life, one that no longer feels authored by me. I enjoy it as an independent entity which speaks to me from an unknown self-created individuality.

During this last year of adjusting to life in the pandemic, I was diagnosed with cancer and have felt no urge to create at all. As I start to feel better, I’m experiencing some stirrings towards the printmaking, but none towards the photography. My need to “get” has diminished during this year, so perhaps that was a more basic motivation than I knew. As life opens up after the pandemic and hopefully the cancer goes into remission, it will be interesting to note what my eyes will see or what my hands will want to do. The usual patterns have been disrupted and there’s much to be discovered.

I think of you as a perennial student and I know you’ve studied many techniques. Does it seem that the directions you’ve taken and the changes that occur in your work reflect interior changes?

All along, I’ve been involved in years of work in The Diamond Approach on self-doubt, self-criticism and self-esteem. When I was able to dissolve the bulk of that, a growing freedom of expression ensued. I began to feel that whatever direction I wanted to take was legitimate as long as it surprised and delighted me or had achieved its own purpose (which I may not have intended). This is another way of talking about art having its own autonomy. It becomes all about learning to allow what’s really there. Allowing is a major feat of non-doing, non-making. That’s a whole subject to explore in considering art and spirituality: the allowing of art vs the doing of art.

Do you think it’s fair to say that as your awareness has developed, your art has evolved from being an object like a pot that you make and intentionally put out into the world, to something you notice and “get” or capture from the world, to a collaboration or conversation that allows elements inside and outside yourself to communicate and coalesce into an autonomous entity?

I would say it’s a conversation between me and the picture. When I’m doing photography, I find out what’s going on through the action of taking the picture plus whatever I do in Photoshop, a process of discovery and affirmation that unfolds from a pre-conscious place. Oh, look what happens when I overlay the picture with that texture! It does something that I like, but wouldn’t have known to do consciously. Printmaking is similar. I try different approaches to achieve an unknown result. By hand. Sometimes I can pre-visualize that something might work or probably won’t, but I won’t be sure ahead of time that it will be exactly right. It can look good but still not be right. When it’s right, there is a click in the heart. Again, it’s a conversation between me and the picture in both cases. Perhaps that’s why a picture that works has its own autonomy later, because it has had its say. I have to hear what it has to say, because if it’s only me speaking, the picture has been disrespected and intruded upon.

That’s what a good conversation is, right? I hear you—and I want to know more about it, so you and I explore and I respond to your exploration and vice versa. The art work can be asked to express something beyond what is obvious, but whatever the enhanced expression turns out to be has to not exceed its innate potential. Perhaps those pieces that don’t really gel suffer from the imposition of being seen as more or less than what they really are.

Thank you. It seems to be about resisting the temptation to decide in advance and learning instead to allow what’s really there.