No

THE ART UNDERNEATH THE WORD

I love writing but sometimes there just aren’t enough words, or I don’t get the placement right - the piecing together of words - to be able to express what I mean and what is inside me.

This piece is titled No but I haven’t decided whether Barbie will be in it or not.

I made a piece of art this afternoon. Now I’m trying to figure out…Barbie? Or no Barbie? I would love to hear your thoughts. Now I’ll rewind the events that took place over the last 32 hours or so.

Yesterday, I posted this note on automatic writing and drawing that I had done in the morning. As a hypnotist, it’s something I’ve been exploring for a while with researching the history of the phenomena and in experimenting on myself figuring out how to do it. From the year 2000 to 2025, I have experienced creative blocks which have manifested in different ways and until now, nothing seemed to get me back to a place that felt like I had come home or landed in the familiar landscape of creativity. But it feels like something has shaken loose, or a barrier has become more transparent between my conscious, critical mind and my inner landscape.

And then yesterday afternoon, I did something that felt wild and free. I went to a thrift store and tried to be as open as possible yet with the intention of creating an art project out of second-hand whatever. I knew I wanted something that already had a frame and I spent quite a bit of time in the toy isles. I don’t know why I ended up with a Barbie Doll, but I did; and a black frame that had a washboard kind of texture that filled the inside from edge to edge. Then I went to one of my favorite antique stores and found some rusted wire and some other strange pieces of hardware that I have no idea what I’ll do with them. The last stop was at a local art supply store and left with a small acrylic paint set, some acrylic spray paint and some oil pastels.

Thrift store finds. The piece on the right is supposedly from the 1800s.

In my other publication, Letters from the Big Sky, I’ll be dipping into the history of automatic writing and drawing and sharing a snippet of what my voice sounds like as put myself into trance.

Turns out, the artform of automatic writing and drawing goes all the way back to the Song dynasty (Chinese civilization, 960–1279 CE) and the trail of breadcrumbs is long and winding between then and now with notable psychologists using it, mediums and spiritualists, and artists and writers from the Surrealist Movement were known to use it as well. -that aimed to unlock the power of the unconscious mind.¹

No and the abscence of Barbie.

Under the big sky,

Rhaine

1. Surrealism was a 20th-century avant-garde art and cultural movement, founded in Paris in 1924 by André Breton, that aimed to unlock the power of the unconscious mind. Influenced by Dada and psychoanalysis, it sought to blend dream and reality into a "surreality" through bizarre, illogical, and dreamlike imagery.