Rubberstampmadness - RSM#110 article

(The following article appeared in the March/April, 2000 issue of RubberStampMadness.)

Carving as Meditation
The Art of Dana Anderson
By Ricë Freeman-Zachery

Some rubber stamp artists rush headlong into eraser carving. They see a couple of carvings, find an image they really like and then attack the first eraser that crosses their path, slicing into it with a razor-sharp #11 blade and cutting away until the eraser is only a fragment of its former self. Dana Anderson's approach to carving is more like her approach to life: calm, thoughtful, meditative. "For seven years, I carried around, in my purse, a perfect, untouched Pink Pearl eraser until finally I got the nerve to try my hand at actually carving it," Anderson says. She'd carried it in her purse for so long, never admitting to herself that she intended to carve it, that it had become shiny and slick--totally useless for erasing, but still carvable. "When I finally carved it, I was so worried about messing it up that I used my Canon PC-11 photocopier to photocopy my own hand," she remembers, noting that she reduced the image of her hand over and over until it fit perfectly on top of the poor little Pink Pearl. "Then I carved the outline of my hand, cut away the excess and ended by incising a heart into the palm of the hand," says Anderson. "Voilá! My first heart-in-the-hand image!" It was a design she'd always wanted to bring to life, and she reports that this first carving took "all of three minutes"--much less time than it took to manipulate the size of the image. "My first hand-carved stamp," exults Anderson. "It made me sooooo happy to do that--ridiculously so!" That was in 1990. Ten years later, she boasts a collection of several hundred hand-carved images, and the story of how she came to turn her carvings into cards and calendars and how she came to teach a class called Rubber Stamp Carving as Meditation is a story worth hearing.

From New York to Texas

Anderson was born in Schenectady, New York. After a peripatetic childhood, she attended Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts (now University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma), in Chickasha, Oklahoma. Anderson chose her college carefully for its unusual, experimental liberal arts curriculum emphasizing interdisciplinary studies, team teaching and independent study--all innovations that shaped her "out-of-the-box" creative thinking at an early age. There, she majored in comparative literature and French, preparing for a career in editing and writing, a dream she fulfilled in her 20s. It wasn't until she moved to Dallas though, that she first discovered rubber stamping. Her early job as the typesetter for D Magazine, one of the first "city magazines," was perfect for someone who'd long been fascinated by the shapes of letters and numbers. "All my storybooks from childhood reveal a strange compulsion: I drew boxes around every single word in every single book," she explains. "I loved the shapes the words formed. I loved the spaces around the words. Even before I could read, they fascinated me."

That love of the way letters look led to a fascination with the various ways they can be formed. "One of my earliest toys was an old typewriter my mom donated to my 'cause,'" she remembers. "I taught myself to type with two fingers when I was 4 or 5." The typesetting job in her 20s seemed a natural offshoot. Then, 15 years later, she discovered her first rubber stamps--a rubber alphabet, naturally. "I still have it and still love it: a Standard Peg Alphabet Set, size 00, made by Standard Rubber Company," she says. She bought the Peg Figure Set--the numbers to go with the alphabet--and although the outlay seemed steep, she went back and bought both letters and numbers in the next smaller size. "Those alphabets held my interest for a long, long time--probably five years," she says. In 1991, she met a woman, Dana Reynolds, who became a friend and co-leader of women's retreats. As they traveled together, Anderson quickly discovered that Reynolds was a serious rubber addict. "Wherever we were, we'd hit the rubber stamp stores and gorge ourselves on a feast of fabulous rubber images," says Anderson. "But this never really satisfied me. I found quickly that the stamps that really interested me were the ones that produced images that looked hand-carved. What interested me from the beginning was the capturing of evidence of the human spirit--the flawed, imperfectly made image cut by the human hand." Her fondness for the look of carving sprang from her childhood interest in linoleum carving. Back then she carved mostly images to be used for creating Christmas cards, and she still has one that she did when she was 12 or 13.

Transformation

All the pieces were in place to produce a dedicated eraser carver, but the transformation didn't occur right away. In the rest of her life, Anderson was undergoing changes that, while seemingly unrelated to her art, would play a major role in her metamorphosis. In 1980, Anderson started meditating, something--in the beginning--totally unrelated to her art. While she dabbled in stamping, calligraphy and type design, her professional life was so demanding that she couldn't really pursue any of them as she wished. By 1985 she was so busy with her work as a marriage and family therapist in Dallas, with a successful practice and lots of stress, that she had little time for any art at all. And then things began to change, slowly. "In 1988, a client I had worked with for four years committed suicide. I was devastated by the experience," says Anderson, who had searched at length for a non-verbal method to help her client, who was not doing well with traditional verbal therapy. "After her death, I intensified my search for a non-verbal method of intervention for my other clients, a method that would provide some of the growth experiences I myself wanted in my own healing process." This search for alternative approaches to healing led her first to Rhinebeck, New York, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, in 1989, she first experienced Holotropic Breathwork, a healing modality that was exactly what she'd been wanting. After her first session, Anderson says she began experiencing "an unusual phenomenon." It occurred rarely at first but became more frequent. "I'd be sitting in my office, nearly always with a couple," she reports. "All of a sudden, I would sort of check out for a millisecond, 'see' a gorgeous image floating before my eyes, feel my pulse rate slow down in a very pleasant way, and gain an insight into the process with the couple."

The image she saw each time was that of a "fabulously radiant" field of daffodils. Never having seen a field of daffodils, much less one so filled with beautiful light, Anderson was both intrigued and mystified by her vision. It began to come about once a week. "A year after it began, the vision came with a word: 'corvallis,'" explains Anderson. Pleased to have a clue to go along with the vision, she had no inkling what a "corvallis" was. "Was it a breed of horse, a wine label, a kind of butterfly? Was it a galaxy or a star I'd never heard of? Was it a kind of daffodil, perhaps?" For weeks she eagerly inquired of everyone what the word meant. She was so overjoyed to find someone who knew that she hugged and kissed the man who mused, "I think it's a town in Oregon." When she opened the road atlas to the map of Oregon, there was an inset photograph of--what else?--a field of daffodils. Daffodils. Corvallis. The next clue came many months later at a wedding party for a friend, when Anderson met an intriguing stranger who mentioned that he'd just returned from his family's farm in Oregon, where he'd planted 40,000 daffodil bulbs. Anderson had to sit down to catch her breath. Were all the flashing lights and little bells some sort of signal, or was it just Anderson falling madly in love? With all the signs leading her into romance, you'd think that she and the Daffodil Man would marry and move to Corvallis to raise flowers, right? The romance indeed blossomed just like the flowers, and Anderson did follow her love to the coast of Oregon. But they didn't live happily ever after. Instead, they struggled in an on-again off-again connection for another two years, until one fateful day in 1994 when all that changed. The Daffodil Man met Anderson's best friend at a community function Anderson was hosting, and in one of those awful, fast-forward scenes from a bad movie, they fell in love and got married in less than two months, and began a family a few months later. "So then it felt as though I'd lost my vision, my best friend, my lover, my Higher Power's companionship and trusted guidance, plus all I'd already left behind two-and-half-years earlier in Dallas. I was downtrodden," says Anderson in just a slight understatement.

Creativity through erasers

It was during this tumultuous time that Anderson began to look for a creative outlet to help her recover her equilibrium. "The whole ordeal really badly affected my inner life because I had so deeply experienced the 'daffodil vision' as a guide for my life transition, a harbinger of only good things to come," says Anderson. She needed to relax and refocus, and since she'd long admired the stamped calendars of artist Susan Riecken, she attempted to duplicate the tiny alphabet she thought Riecken had carved on pencil erasers. "For years I had imagined that this is what I would do, but when I finally tried it, it was hard! I found it next to impossible," she admits. But after her success with the little Pink Pearl, she was emboldened to try again, albeit this time on larger erasers. On the first two days of January in 1994, she carved an uncial alphabet. The next January, on the first two days of the new year, she carved a Neuland hand. And that Christmas she designed her first rubber-stamped calendar, complete with quotations. "During the 1994 Christmas season I had designed my first calendar--a calligraphic and slide transfer design with no rubber stamps," she remembers. "I made only four copies of the calendar because it was very expensive to produce."

The first stamped calendar, the following year, was a slightly larger undertaking. "It was birthed for practical reasons," admits Anderson. "I needed an inexpensive and one-of-a-kind gift for 70 fabulous friends. And I had no money!" She calculated that this first calendar cost about 69 cents apiece to produce, not including the considerable investment of her time. "People loved them!" she says. "In 1996, I did it again. That year, some people asked if they could buy some to give to others as gifts." She agreed, charging a slightly profitable $16 per calendar. The next two years, she made the calendars, but she no longer gave them as gifts. Instead, she looked at them as a business venture. During the holiday season of 1998, she sold approximately 300 calendars, and she's since added stamped cards to her product line.

Daffodils and Corvallis

Daffodils brought Anderson to Oregon, and now "Corvallis" is calling her again--beyond her art and life being featured in this issue of Corvallis-based Rubberstampmadness, she is participating in a Holotropic Breathwork "intensive" in the small college town in Oregon. In the eight years since her move west, Anderson's life has changed in many ways. "I gave up the traditional practice of marriage and family therapy in favor of offering spiritual direction, and I have refused to enter into any full-time work, either for myself or for someone else," she explains. "I have experienced a nearly total media fast. No TV, only public radio--and little of that--no newspapers, for six years." Anderson is philosophical about how things have turned out with the Daffodil Man and her best friend, now his wife. "It's all turned out perfectly, though you couldn't have convinced me of that in 1994," Anderson continues. "The daffodil vision brought me a new life, just as I always thought it would. It was indeed the vehicle that lifted me out of an useful but uninspired professional life in the big city, a life devoid of art-making. "Eventually, I became the agent who brought together my two dear friends, though I was miserably unhappy to do so at the time they met! Each of them is reserved by nature. They never would have found one another without someone a bit more outgoing to bring them together. "We have all been empowered to live more deeply and strongly as a result of knowing one another and playing these roles in one another's lives. It's one of the most powerful 'win-win outcomes' I know of. There's simply no question it was all meant to be." These days Anderson earns her living by providing what she has tagged "Support for Waking Up in a World of Love, Service and Joy." "I am in the business of helping people live more authentically, as themselves," she explains, "living their own dreams instead of spending their whole lives fulfilling others' dreams or trying not to do this or that--trying not to get hurt again, trying not to make that mistake again." Some of her clients who receive spiritual direction by telephone are senior citizens who are full of creative ideas but lack an advocate, someone to tell them that they can still create and live a full life, no matter what their age. Others are established artists and writers and composers. "They need someone to check in with on a regular basis, someone to be accountable to about the creative process. They benefit from having an ally who is prepared to walk with them through a challenging creative process, as well as through challenging life transitions," explains Anderson, who also helps her clients stay on schedule with deadlines and commitments.

Meditative carving

These days Anderson spends her leisure hours meditating and making art, which is how she came to teach a class called Rubber Stamp Carving as Meditation--No Kidding! "The class teaches beginners the basics of how to carve rubber stamps from erasers, and then encourages the students to notice how calming, how centering, how quieting the total focus is for the spirit," she says. "Everyone gets it right away." Her students also stamp with their new carvings, learning both the basics of rubber stamping and how their newly discovered art can be used to enhance their spiritual growth. "We sometimes stamp mandalas, using two or three carved images in succession, in a circular motif, changing ink colors, experimenting with masking, rollered color, glitter [and more]," Anderson continues. They also make altar cards, cards designed to grace personal altars or shrines. [Editor's note: For more on shrines, altars and guardian mythology, see Rubberstampmadness #101 (September/October 1998).] "These might include images or words," she says. "Students use my alphabet stamps for stamping quotes and then get further inspired to learn to carve alphabets." In addition to those two complete alphabets that she carved herself, Anderson has some 200 other carved images. "I organize them sort of horribly, I suppose," she says. "I keep my most-used and well-loved stamps in a little Mexican zipper pouch on my stamping table. And I love the randomness of the color from the roller I keep with them." She stamps in her sun room, which has windows on three sides, or--in winter--upstairs in her playroom, a room more suited to larger projects. "It feels like a treehouse with two large windows looking out on hemlock, spruce and beach pine trees and a huge, three-story laurel hedge," she says. "I like to do production on the calendar upstairs in this room, where there are more flat surfaces for working on many things at once."

Conclusion

Today she generally carves on material a little finer than Pink Pearl. When necessary, she opts for Safety-Kut, which comes in large sheets. Still, she finds that there's nothing quite like sinking the #11 blade of an X-Acto knife into the buttery texture of a Staedtler-Mars eraser. The quality of the material enhances the soothing process of creating art by hand, Anderson suggests, a process that is meditation in its purest form. "It's just so simple," she says. "This work, this play disappears me into a kind of non-being, a Silence--an unexpectedly delicious meditation. I am so incredulously grateful to be Home!"

Ricë Freeman-Zachery is a regular contributor to these pages (Rubber Stamp Madness). She lives the artistic life in Midland, Texas.

This article reprinted with the kind permission of RubberStampMadness.

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