Bringing the Tree into the Gallery

At my Final Exhibition I wanted to created an installation within the gallery and represent the site specific trees that I had created art around. To form a web of connection between the interior world and the exterior.

The spice and pigment Mandala that I created was over three feet in diameter. I used the same materials that I use in my site specific work. At the show my greatest nightmare was that someone would walk through this work. I had visions of it as my great friends and musician (Frogwater) for that evenings daughter was dying to plough through it. The opening was a blur...I do remember going to show one of my artist friends Nicole Chan the work and gasped as I approached the destroyed Mandala. An old man fest up to it and said he had walked through it. What a test...what a night to let go and to embrace the impermanence of it all. This work even in the natural world is really about impermanence, just like Tibetan sand paintings. It is gentle revaluation of the truth of our transitory existence.

The destruction of this piece gave me an opportunity to create a ritual piece for our ancestors. The time was Halloween or Samhien and perfect. I went in the next day and resurrected this work. With red puja powder from India and peacock feathers. I made a call for fellow artists to bring rocks to honor their ancestors and to place them around the activated shrine. To create a circle of stones surrounding the interior..


To be continued.. more to tell on this work
Still to this day it is a mystery who destroyed my shrine, my art... for some reason I do not think it was the old man who did it...Although tramutic it really made the piece more powerful

Rite of Passage-Mt. Tam..Continued

6/13/2008
This weekend was a great moment in my life. As a child I had always dreamed of receiving my M.F.A. I had fantasies of being an art professor that walked around this world with paint all over my clothes. Dreams come true. To receive an award was really not in my dream, but it made it even more powerful. I was compelled to honor this rite of passage with a tree shrine. I knew the perfect place, the meadow on the top of Mt. Tam, from this vista you could see north to the Ocean, Stinson Beach and south to the Golden Gate in San Francisco. Don and I hiked to the meadow on Sunday and saw in the distance a lone tree facing the extraordinary view. I instantly saw the red tail and I knew it was the place.
This work was a bit of challenge because of the rocks the surrounded most of the trunk of the tree. Never the less it was a momentous. Don and spent the entire afternoon lounging under the tree in reflection and I in absorption at the completion of my personal rite of passage.

I love how the image was like the micro and the macro. Within the rocks that surrounded the tree there was a minature forest. I guess it was not really a lone tree.

Rite of Passage-Mt. Tam

On June 14th, I graduated with a M.F.A. in the Arts and Consciousness Program at JFK. It was an amazing weekend of celebration and ritual. Don flew up from a L.A. on Friday I was overwhelmed with emotion and connection to my fellow students at JFK's small gathering at the Berkeley Campus. On Saturday was the formal graduation and I was awarded the student of the year in the Holistic Studies Program at JFK.
This is the speech the Dean gave to me-it was such an honor.
To Lisa Rasmussen:

Lisa,

Five years ago, you entered the Department of Arts & Consciousness as a student in the Transformative Arts program. As your creative process unfolded, your paintings grew ever more compelling. By the end of three years, you transferred to the MFA program to more deeply engage your artwork. During this period, you continued to develop a program in transformative arts for clients at the Lincoln Child Center in Oakland.
Your program bridged the gap between art as a transformative tool and art as a form of cultural expression. Your Lincoln Child Care Center students exhibited their work in a Sausalito Gallery and were the focus of an annual benefit for the Center. Because of your dedicated and creative work with the students at Lincoln Child Center, they have experienced the invaluable joy of self-expression and the all-important process of being seen in their fuller humanity. You have been a profound, transformative influence in their lives.


As an artist, your work has gone far beyond the limits of traditional painting. Your final MFA Exhibition entitled Caol Ait (Thin Spaces) reveals the full scope and power of your artwork, moving beyond the genre of painting into installation and environmental art, as well as movement, ritual and sculpture. In your teaching and in your artwork you celebrate the realization that art lives at the edges of life and spirit. You explore and then dissolve the boundaries between inner and outer, self and other and in so doing represent the highest ideals of Holistic Studies. You are an outstanding individual, and we are proud to nominate you as Student of the Year. Congratulations and best wishes for continued success.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PHD
Dean, School of Holistic Studies

Salem, Witches, Haunted inns, the almighty dollar and "EARTH ART"

On July 7, 2008 I created my first East Coast shrine in Salem, Massachusetts the notorious place of the ‘burning times’ in U.S. This work was a memorial as well as a personal quest to foster reverence for the sacred feminine, which is the archetype of the Earth.
I arrived in NYC on a red eye and there Don picked me up in our rental car and we were off for an adventure to Salem, Massachusetts,which was 4 1/2 hours away. The day was totally lucid for both us. The plan was to meet Cynthia a great friend from JFK in Salem Massachusetts to reconnect and to do some art. We arrived sychronistically at the Salem Inn when Cynthia did. I checked out our room 12 and it felt dark and creepy. Later we had found out it was surrounded by haunted rooms above and on both sides. It was strange Don and I instinctively went to the Peabody house instead, which was a yellow colonial from the 17th century. After our experience in room 12 we asked for a room in the Peabody house.There the energy was light and spacious. Don was totally intrigued and was a ghost hunter for those two days, asking everyone if they had an experience with the spirits at the historic Inn. It is a beautiful inn with impeccable service and it is really haunted by unsettled spirits.
Salem is dotted with all these silly tourist traps. Over priced and kitchy to hilt.The shops were filled with cheap trinkets and the center monument was the lady from the TV show Bewitched. I felt unsettled and disappointed at the consumerism in Salem. It seemed like any other tourist town with a catch of history that they exploited. Were had the real roots of this place gone? " How and why does materialism, consumerism make a tragic event feel like a Ripley's believe or not?" as my friend and co-founder of Art is Moving, Lauren shared a similar experience that she had in small town in Spain where there was a torture museum that displayed the methods and horrific tools used in Inquisition . In the tourist traps of Salem, I felt uneasy and I was really unsure of where and if I was going to do my Art.

The next day we went to the Willows park which is right on the bay and I saw my tree. It was far in the distance..and isolated from the carnival like crowd.
As I approached it is was a lone maple tree steps away from the edge of the coast. The gross and some what symbolic thing was it had a used sanitary napkin at its base. I say that because there was garbage all over this park. This was an experience I have seen at many sacred sites around the world. At the Hill of Tara in Ireland, the most sacred passage called weirdly the mound of passages, was littered with garbage. Symbolic? I removed that and Cynthia who was videoing me said it was anointed by menstrual blood. Earlier Cynthia had created her own eco-art, a spiral with rocks on the beach. While she was creating I was moved to collect mussel shells to incorporate into my composition. The tree shrine that I was creating was a crescent,lunar one and the mussels also symbolized the feminine connection to the ocean, which is said to be the womb of the world.



As I connected with the tree I remembered an amazing dream that I had were I was led to the world tree and there I had created a shrine. Afterwards, I laid underneath the tree, starring into the heavens- through the branches of the eternal in Ahh..

I hope my shrines will help build awareness of our spiritual connection with the environment, and that they will help foster reverence for all life. if you actually stubbled upon one of my shrines shoot me a line or if you have comments I would love to hear your response.
Namaste, Lisa

Earth Art in Creel Mexico, Spring Equinox 2008, Planes, trains, taxis, and ...

This was a beautiful trip and art adventure. We took many modes of transportation to get to our destination. We left the Bay Area on March 20, 2008 taking mass transit BART to SFO and took a plane to El Paso,Texas. We changed planes in Salt Lake City it was magical as we boarded the small craft to view the snow covered mountains with the sun and the moon in the sky. We then arrived in El Paso and took a cab across the border to Juarez, Mexico. There we hopped on a bus to Chihuhua, Mexico for six hour bus ride into the heart of Mexico. In Chihuhua we hopped on the famous train called El Chepa, which would take us into the copper canyon. We decided to take the local train as that would be more interesting, than the tourist train, which was filled with elderly, white middle class Americans.
We sat next to a beautiful Raramuri family. The Raramuri are the indigenous whose home is in the Copper Canyon. (more on them later). We got off the train in Creel and then rented bikes and rode into the Canyon, where I created this earth art.


Trickster dog, checking out my art. All of sudden I look up and this dog has been watching me create for sometime.


Raramuri women, creating in the distance from my own work. The English word for this area was Mushrooms and Frogs as the monoliths resembled them.



Beautiful ancient Raramuri basket weaver. She reminded me of the tree.


Down the road from my Earth Art was an old mission. There was a beautiful child there. I love the aesthetic of the Raramuri's.. the amazing colors that they wear. Walking Art...Art is life! More later on this project.

Tree Quote

The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life and activity; it affords protection to all beings.

Buddhist Sutra

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Communion

This photograph is a view that I took as I gazed down the Devils Throat at the Uguazu Falls in Argentina. What a mystical experience