Artful Being
A creative practice for presence, intuition and authentic expression.
Artful Being is a meditative creative practice developed by artist Liane Ricci. It brings together meditation, intuitive art making, color, symbolism and reflection as a way of moving beyond conscious thought and expectation and into a more direct relationship with the creative process.
At its heart is a simple idea: when judgment quiets, authentic expression has room to emerge.
Artful Being isn't about learning to make “good” art. It is about paying attention, becoming curious about what appears, and allowing the act of making to become a form of listening.
The Artful Being Method
The Artful Being Method
Where It Began
Artful Being grew from my own studio practice and from a question I kept returning to:
What happens when we stop trying to make something good and simply pay attention?
After many years working professionally as an artist and designer, I became increasingly interested in what happened when I stepped away from outcome, expectation and conscious decision-making.
Meditation began to enter my studio practice. I experimented with intuitive mark making, blind drawing, color as sensation, symbolic imagery, dreamwork and reflective writing. The less I tried to control what I was making, the more personal the work became.
Eventually, I began sharing these practices with others through classes and workshops, and later through The Artful Being School in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Working alongside people with very different levels of artistic experience reinforced something I had discovered in my own practice: creativity could be less about performance and more about presence.
Those experiences gradually became what I now call The Artful Being Method.
The Artful Being Method
The Artful Being Method brings together a collection of practices I return to again and again. They aren't rules or steps that need to happen in a particular order. They are different ways of creating enough space for intuition, curiosity and discovery to enter the creative process.
Stillness
The practice often begins before a mark is made.
Meditation and simple attention can shift the focus away from planning and toward noticing. The intention isn't to empty the mind, but to create a little more space around its constant commentary.
Intuitive Mark Making
A line doesn't have to represent anything.
Drawing without planning, and sometimes without looking, can loosen the impulse to judge and correct. Gesture, repetition and movement allow the hand to respond before the analytical mind has decided what should happen.
Color
Color became a way of exploring emotion through the body. I developed a series of guided meditations moving through the chakra energy points, inviting participants to notice the sensations and emotions arising in different areas of the body and then express those feelings through color.
The traditional color associations of the chakras provide a point of departure, but the practice isn't about choosing the “correct” color. It is about noticing what is felt and allowing that raw sensation or emotion to move onto the page without judgment.
In this way, color becomes less about composition or aesthetics and more about feeling, energy and expression.
Symbols & Inner Imagery
Shapes, marks and images sometimes recur without being consciously chosen.
Rather than immediately trying to interpret them, the practice is first to notice them. With time, a personal visual language can begin to emerge, one that belongs specifically to the person making the work.
Dreamwork & Reflection
Dream imagery, visual journaling and reflective writing offer other ways of noticing what is happening beneath the surface of conscious thought.
Making and observing become part of the same process. The question becomes less What does this mean? and more simply:
What do I notice?
A Practice, Not a Prescription
You don't need to consider yourself an artist to work this way.
And if you are an artist, Artful Being isn't intended to replace technique, discipline or craft. It simply creates another kind of creative space, one in which there is nothing in particular to prove or accomplish.
Some days that might produce a painting. Other days it might produce a page of strange marks, an unexpected color combination, a sentence, a symbol, or nothing you particularly want to keep.
The object isn't always the point.
The attention is.
Artful Being & My Studio Practice
Artful Being isn't separate from my work as an artist.
It is one of the ways I return to it.
My work moves between painting, pattern, surface and object, but beneath those different forms is the same curiosity: allowing an idea to develop without deciding too quickly what it needs to become.
A painting might suggest a pattern. A mark might become a wallcovering. An experiment with material might lead somewhere entirely unexpected.
Artful Being reminds me to leave room for that to happen.
To listen before deciding.
To follow curiosity.
To let the work lead.
An Evolving Practice
Artful Being began in my own studio, eventually moving into classes, workshops and The Artful Being School. Today, it has returned largely to where it began: my own creative practice.
The ideas continue to evolve through painting, writing, meditation and experimentation. Over the years, I have developed a growing collection of exercises, observations and practices exploring intuitive mark making, color, symbolism, dreamwork and visual journaling.
Currently, all of this material is making its way into what will become The Artful Being Method, the book.
For now, I continue to make, write and explore, allowing the book to take shape through the same process of curiosity and discovery that inspired Artful Being in the first place.
Artful Being remains, at its heart, a practice of paying attention through making.
About Liane Ricci
Liane Ricci is an artist and designer and the founder of Ricci Studio. Her work moves fluidly between painting, pattern, surface and object, shaped by an ongoing curiosity about color, material, intuition and the creative process.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and is held in the permanent collection of the U.S. Department of State Art Bank. Her work in art and design has also been recognized with honors including the Luxe RED Award and Interior Design's Best of Year Award.