Today we’d like to introduce you to Terri Mcgee.
Terri, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
Making art has always given me a sense of inner sanctuary. A space I could go within myself to escape the suffering and fearful aspects of living in a world with so much uncertainty. In 2009 I experienced the beginning of a very long and grueling three-year health crisis. This unexpected illness dragged me kicking and screaming through a much-needed inner transformation. I began to understand the phrase, “you don’t always get what you want, but you get what you need!”
Although very difficult, the experience gifted me with abundant opportunities for introspection and moments of clarity. One of the most significant realizations I received during this time was that in the past I used art as a way to escape from life rather than a way to embrace, heal and create more deeply with life. This realization changed everything! I discovered an entirely new depth of creativity and purpose inside of me. I began to explore painting with a new intention and awareness of its healing power.
The energy of creativity is alive and natural. It carries with it the power to harmonize the psyche, thereby influencing the health of the body. In order to embrace the healing benefits during my painting process, I had to give myself permission to not know how a painting would unfold or how my healing process would unfold. This gave space for new perceptions and new possibilities to emerge in my painting, health and life!
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I currently paint visionary works of art and offer creativity playshops to support the process of healing and self-realization in myself and in others. Our deeper selves are already one with the harmony, wisdom and creative potentials of the entire universe. The layers of mental and emotional habit patterns that we acquire over the years keep us feeling disconnected and cut off from ourselves and from our source of creativity.
My acrylic paintings and India ink paintings translate visions and intuitive insights I receive in meditation and during the creative process to visually communicate the remembrance of our inherent unity with life and the creative matrix of the universe.
The art playshops integrate painting practices with meditation to help harmonize the relationship between the intellect and the intuition. These practices increase access to inner guidance, awareness, and new possibilities of perception, creativity and self-transformation.
Artists face many challenges, but what do you feel is the most pressing among them?
Artists offer bridges of understanding between the formless unknown and the already known world of form. The biggest challenge facing artists today is that we live in a culture that doesn’t teach the value of creativity. Most of us are raised in a society that fears the unknown because of a mechanism in the human mind that has a compulsive need to control all variables in life and tends to judge that which it does not already know or cannot control as bad. This tendency is the biggest challenge not only to artists but to the creative potential of humanity as a whole.
This inner resistance to the unknown blocks the mysterious creative process which is birthed from the unknown. Creativity uses intuitive impulses beyond what is currently contained in the mind in order to offer a new possibility. This is how we grow, consciously evolve and fulfill higher potentials of harmony, passion, freedom and prosperity. Without the willingness to make space for that which is beyond what we already understand or perhaps misunderstand, how can we access new possibilities?
By teaching our children to value creativity and meditation, we increase our capacity to thrive as a global community capable of new possibilities in collective wellness, collaboration, innovation and prosperity.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
Terri Mcgee Art: I currently have a studio at Canopy Artist Studios in Austin, TX and can open my studio for show by appointment. I will be exhibiting at Canopy Artist Studios for 2018 EAST Austin Studio Tours, November 10 – 11 & 17 – 18, 2018. My work is currently on exhibit at Art for the People in Austin, TX and Noon Spoon in Marble Falls, TX. Austin Art For Wellness: Stay tuned for updated art play shop schedule at www.AustinArtForWellness.com.
Contact Info:
- Address: 916 Springdale Rd Studio 201
Austin, TX 78702 - Website: www.TerriMcgeeArt.com —and— www.AustinArtForWellness.com
- Phone: 512-763-0278
- Email: Terri@TerriMcgeeArt.com —and— Terri@AustinArtForWellness.com
- Instagram: Terri.Mcgee27
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TerriMcgeeArt/
- Other: https://www.facebook.com/austinartforwellness/
Image Credit:
Steven Glicker
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