total income

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
—PAUL KLEE

Twentieth-century abstract painter Paul Klee saw clearly: Art makes the unseen world visible. Invisible forms, qualities, and ideas, which lie undetected below the world of surface appearances, come into view through an artist's creative intelligence.

In a very real way, art springs from the depths of the invisible. And for 21st-century painter Brooks Anderson, the invisible signifies, most of all, the thought structure of metaphysical ideas that he has learned from his study of Christian Science. These ideas filter with great power and authority into his paintings—and into his life.

Mr. Anderson recently experienced a thought breakthrough. And as a result, he now paints the canvas of life with a broader comprehension of income—a metaphysically based, enlightened view of the seamless continuity and wholeness of income. Everything it takes to make a total artist—creativity and supply—come "factory installed" (as he puts it) from the divine artist/Soul that animates, integrates, and illuminates our lives.

How can an artist find both creative and economic fulfillment? Or frame it this way: Can an artist demonstrate dominion over the centuries-old, romanticized (but no-fun) archetype of the "starving artist"—and live abundantly, free from worry and financial hardship? Artist Brooks Anderson of Santa Rosa, California, says, YES.

I telephoned Brooks. We got acquainted for a minute or two. And then, without skipping a beat—and with no prompting from me—he launched into an inspiring take on challenges of making a living as an artist. I went with the flow. I never asked him the five questions I'd prepared. Save them for next time. Hearing what was on his mind—and viewing his luminous, structurally and optically compelling paintings—was enough.

Energetic, exuberant, dramatic, and intense in an upbeat, engaging way—I wish you could hear him live—Brooks deploys words like an action painter attacking unprimed canvas: Unafraid. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

BROOKS ANDERSON: I was going through the doldrums in sales about a year ago, and I hired someone to consult with me to explore new ways of breaking free of financial stress. She's not advertising in the Journal as a Christian Science practitioner, but she's a Christian Scientist and somebody I turned to as a spiritual coach. She helped give me a solid spiritual perspective. And she's also very artistically sensitive. Since then, I've experienced a branching out of my thought in regard to my work and its importance. And also seeing through lies about the inability to sell things and about obstacles to creativity.

JEFFREY HILDNER: What have you learned?

One of the things I learned when praying with another practitioner years ago about selling my artwork is that my sales are not determined by a sense of rightness or entitlement—as in how much I pray. That's deterministic thinking. The selling of my artwork is actually the result of my awakening to the principle of the seamless fabric of my identity. The inception or origination of ideas, the creation and implementation of them, the fruition, exposition, and acquisition of those ideas—these are not fragmentary, dominolike, separate aspects of my work. They're inclusive—unified, one. And Soul is governing the process. So I paint from the resource of abundance—an abundance of creative ideas. And I expect that abundance to be manifested in other seamless ways, including supply for my family. The selling of the artwork represents abundance. And that form of abundance is as vital and ingrained and as natural a part of my identity as any of the ideas that come to fruition in the form of a painting. beautiful,

That's beautiful, Brooks.

It was very profound to me at the time and still is.

You're talking about something that lots of artists can relate to—the quest to achieve a healthy equilibrium between creative fulfillment and economic fulfillment.

What is the script we're following that says they should be different? There is no difference. That's the beauty of it all. Lord knows, it's taken a long time for me to get to this point. But I'm finding that there is no difference. Why should we think that the income that comes to us in the form of creative ideas and the income that comes to us in the form of a check or cash have a different source? All income, in every form, comes from the same source—God, infinite Spirit. And it comes abundantly.

Let me ask you a point-blank question: This metaphysical viewpoint—how's it working for you?

It's working. It's like some of the best physical healings we experience. Yet the physical part isn't the real healing. The real healing is the movement in thought that comes first. So now I'm just busy expressing the creative ideas that come to me. I don't sit in front of my easel each day and think about how and why I'm getting them. These ideas about the totality of supply—creative ideas and monetary income coming from the same source—are just part of me. They're just completely natural to me now. These principles of my God-directed activity are an effortless and beauteous part of who I am.

Your insight is that there's a continuity, a unity, an equivalence, between income that's experienced in terms of creativity, and income that takes the forms of some kind of remuneration for that creativity, including monetary remuneration.

Income usually is seen as monetary, but way before a check is written, that spiritual income is inspiring artistic ideas. So the total income—creative ideas and remuneration for their expression—is already in place because ideas are always complete. And the check that comes? I think of it as gratitude.

The principle that supply is total and complete is a reliable and powerful principle—reliable and powerful because it's in accord with the laws of divine Principle, God. So as you say, this principle is inherent in you already, and you can rest in the confidence that by acknowledging the nonstop operation and benign force of this principle, it will play itself out in abundant ways in your life. Do I have it right?

Yes. And another really cool thing, Jeffrey, is that people who are viewing my art are part of that process as well. They're inseparable from our common source, divine Soul. They're recognizing in some degree, and feeling a kinship with, the creative ideas that I've received and expressed through my art.

The same Spirit stirring you to produce the work stirs the receptivity on the part of others. Therefore, one could expect a natural translation of that receptivity into the purchase of a painting, if we were to be as blunt as that. The gratitude on the part of the viewer is made tangible.

Exactly. Receptivity is key. To paint a painting, I am receptive; and to purchase a painting, others are receptive. And this receptivity to good ideas is a natural part of everyone because it comes from Soul. But I have to get away from a deterministic view, from a zeros-and-ones view. Receptivity is simply awakening.

When you say zeros and ones, I take it you mean a computer code, binary-based view of life, a view that sets up a simplistic game of quid pro quo, a view that separates rather than unifies. And what you mean by deterministic is a view in which limited cause produces a limited effect?

Right. A deterministic view is a distorted view of life that presents false relationships—the illusion that the sun circles around the earth, for example; it's a mortal cause-and-effect view that we need to break free of. And Christian Science shows us how. Breaking free from false perceptions is vital for artists, as well as for anybody in creative fields. When we break free of limited, deterministic thinking—rise above that fog into a correct understanding of the true nature of cause and effect, which is based on the seamless unity of God's abundance—then the sky's the limit!

It gets back to what you said earlier about refusing to see the enterprise of art as a fragmented activity with separate zeros and ones components. The enterprise of art, viewed spiritually, scientifically, forms one complete, integrated picture—a picture composed of limitless freedom and abundance that can be realized by the artist every step along the way.

Yes, exactly, You know, I thought of this metaphor a few years ago. Everyone's riding on a train that's going in a certain direction. We're all inside our little cars, just watching the landscape constantly changing around us, whipping by.

And all of sudden, for some reason, the train stops. Everyone stays on the train, but I, or you, we get off the train. We're just led to get off the train. And we find ourselves in this landscape, walking in this field. And it's infinite. There's no horizon. We've never seen this sky before—this sense of infinity and completeness all around. And we just keep walking away from the train. But everyone's calling to us, "Come back!" They're beckoning—"Come on, the train's going to leave," But, no. We've tasted the real goods. And we keep on walking. And that train doesn't have anything to do with us any more.

Nice. That's exactly what it's like to find new frontiers of form. And you and I, as artists, give all credit to divine Spirit, as the source of our creativity, nudging us off that train. And Spirit is the source of everyone else's creativity, whether they know it or not. But the challenge for those in the art world is to demonstrate some dominion over what can be, at times, the oppression of economic insufficiency. I love that you're targeting that metaphysically as an integral part of your artistic endeavor.

Well, I have to. People ask me, "What do you do?" And I say, "I'm an artist." And so much of the time, it's not a matter of, Oh, my gosh. Wow!" It's, "Are you making a living?" It's just that ingrained, the automatic thought of limitation that's like a curse. And so, yes, of course, I have to include economic fulfillment in my metaphysical view. Marketing is important, but the main thing is to just throw off the curse. Mrs. Eddy got at this in her writing: "Is it a duty for any one to believe that 'the curse causeless cannot come'? Then it is a higher duty to know that God never cursed man, His own image and likeness."  ^{Christian Healing, p. 9.} I love that. One constantly has to throw off the false curse of mortality, no matter what they're doing. It's hogwash, and I don't need to fall for it.

Brooks, let's go back to the nitty-gritty issue of how things have been working out for you since you mentally reframed everything from this powerful spiritual perspective.

I'd say it's a work in progress, but I'm beyond the early signs of it. I've had a breakthrough. I mean, it was a heck of a good year last year. But I'm looking forward to more progress. That's my goal. It was a very big breakthrough last year in working with this wonderful spiritual coach, a very strong metaphysician. She chose to work with me because she saw I'm not only a Christian Scientist, but I'm also someone who's hungry for this. I'm a sponge, and I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and work. I'm a Samuel who said, "I'm coming. I hear you, Father. And I'm ready to go. Let's rock. It's showtime." (I'm not sure Samuel really said that.) I'm really fed up and exhausted with all of the years of deprivation because of being an artist. I want the tools to deal with this curse. The tools are there, and so she gave me some very good ways of utilizing those tools. Hardly anything about the world's description of marketing, hardly anything at all. She saw this as a rare opportunity to work metaphysically with somebody using the tools that we both have in Christian Science. And she saw that we could really go.

I've learned from one of my strongest mentors in art that the underpainting is actually the most important part of the painting. It dictates the composition and the light and the chroma—pure color. But it's not the finished product. It's the process. It's the progress. It's the journey. It's the foundation being laid. It's that dynamic storyboard time when ideas are really flowing. And if you just uninhibit yourself, release yourself from where it's going, and let the paint do the talking, then you have something.

If we transpose metaphorically the concept of underpainting to the individual, then underpainting equals an artist's invisible thought structure. And you've discovered that the spiritual, metaphysical dimension that Christian Science reveals provides the ideal thought structure. The infinite source of creativity—divine Life, Soul—is seamlessly integrating abundance into our lives in every form, including money, if that's what's needed. We just have to mentally plug into that underlying scientific reality, right?

Well, in modern terms, supply is factory-included, factory-packaged. Every form of good is automatically part of us. We always think, "Well, I can express goodness and love and vitality, but oooh, supply, now that's a tricky one." Once again, what kind of baloney is this that we've been following? Supply is factory-included. You wouldn't exist without the supply you need.

So we need to not only be grateful, but to recognize this truth about who we are and how we were created. One thing I learned a long time ago in praying with a practitioner when I had a broken hand was to turn the inspiration, all those trenchant truths, outward. In other words, I'm not the only one that this is true about. It's true for everyone. And that's freeing. That liberates your treatment. The truth of being is dynamic not only for me—it's dynamic for everyone. It's operative right now. And wow, what a freeing, beautiful thing.

See Brooks's website: www.brooksandersonart.com. Read the recent article about his work, "Daring Methods, Daring Paintings," in American Artist, February 2006, pp. 58-65.

Although I am not a lonely individual, my painting of brooding, monolithic shapes in the landscape setting—be they Midwestern grain elevators or giant headlands of remote Northwestern coasts—has always been an abiding and unshakable visual theme. Tested by weather and time, these objects symbolize a spiritual rootedness, an anchor of hope for an often variable and vulnerable human society. The underlying scheme of light and the interplay of foundational abstract composition propels me in a constantly changing direction.

The decision to enter the realm of soft and oil pastels came to me through a dream (a dream in color, of course). My new love affair with oil pastels has played an important role in the application of paint on canvas. Becoming the father of three beautiful little girls has also influenced my work, along with spending a year in the south of France—which propelled me into my exploration of surreal light and the undercurrent of religious symbols seen as landscape.

My early work was a visual response to the detailed, lyrical landscapes of that time: wide-angle narrative, light and shadow play. The more accomplished pieces were heroic, dramatic; compelling to enter; evocative; they had my own stamp.

I paint because I feel I have no choice. There is nothing more satisfying to know than that I am put on earth for this reason. Each painting, each brushstroke, is never the same. It is the most important act I can do. I no longer paint what I see—I'm no longer interested in minute detail, but in what I feel. The landscape always beckons for someone simply to take down notation, to relate its compelling mysteries.

The natural world gives us glimpses of what it means to be alive. In my work, the hallowed places, the fathoms, depths, and environmental fragility are played out side by side along with nature's resilience and spiritual roots. In essence, I consider my landscape and seascape paintings as our own self-portraits—standing on their own as totems, and as a vehicle for helping us all go deeper into what is felt but not seen. A spiritual approach. Each of my works is stamped with the essential vibrancy of light, and a quality that painting is alive and well.

Art can literally change us, as viewer and as artist.

It has the power to challenge, to confront, and to heal.

—BROOKS ANDERSON