Four Ways of Looking at a Stream Drawing, Part One
Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow
My previous blog post, Stay Home and Stream Draw!, was about stream drawing as a pastime during the current pandemic. In the next four posts, I will be taking one of my stream drawings and doing an intuitive reading of it, using a four-step process from Elaine Clayton's book Making Marks: Discover the Art of Intuitive Drawing.
The first way of looking at a stream drawing is based on the way that I originally oriented my drawing. (See the top of this blog post.) This is a time line view, and the imagery is interpreted in terms of past, present, and future. I created this drawing with a particular person in mind, and my interpretation is meant to illuminate their life experience.
The middle portion of the drawing deals with the present. The subject of the reading is currently either spending time in a rural, pastoral setting, or is wishing to, suggested at the top of the section by a yellow bird and patterned farmland. They are seeking to acquire wisdom not in books or philosophy but by reflecting on the patterns found in nature. An influential figure in this person's life, suggested by the face with green eyes in the center of this portion, is someone who appears contentious but who also suggests to me someone knowledgeable in folklore with a strong connection to the natural world. The subject of the reading is dwelling in an emotional atmosphere approaching at times hopelessness, with an undercurrent of anxiety and agitation. See the lower part of this middle portion, with the shadowy network of dark lines and the sleeping figure with the nervous line below. To escape these emotions, they are devoting as much time as they can to sleeping.
During youth, often they stayed up late reading. They enjoyed fables, parables, proverbs, and any other form of literature that imparted wisdom. There was a fascination with any animal in myth that was depicted as symbolic of wisdom or shrewdness. In this portion of the drawing, I see an owl, fox, raven or crow, and serpent. I see two images of the moon in this section of the drawing. For the person in this reading, the moon and its light were comforting.
To a degree, in the future (as seen in the imagery of the blue figure running on green grass with a heart sprouting green leaves at the top of the right-hand portion of the drawing) this person may find some peace, and at times some freedom and light-heartedness, in learning from nature and living at least in imagination in a natural setting, though the undercurrent of anxiety may continue. They perhaps will become interested in a previously unexplored or abandoned religious tradition, as seen in the praying figure and stained glass on the right, and may even begin to explore cooking and foodways. (The red and yellow triangle suggests to me a table or altar with a plate on it, or may itself be a slice of food). Anxiety may lessen temporarily as they begin to have beautiful and pleasurable dreams and visions, an outcome that I see in the rose or heart shape behind the praying figure.
Chakra view. The second way of looking at a stream drawing.
It is fascinating to see how the images in this stream drawing begin to form a past, present, and future as I interpret and relate them to each other. In my next blog post, I will turn the drawing (as seen above) and read it in a way that relates what I see in the drawing to the chakra system--the second way of looking at a stream drawing.
Won't you join me?