Human Design - the Art of Being

About twenty-five years ago, I became involved with the Human Design System. What began as an interest became one of the great loves and defining journeys of my life.

I began studying with Ra Uru Hu, the founder of Human Design, studying here in the U.S., and traveling overseas to learn from him directly. Somewhere along the way, Ra saw something in me. In 2010, he entrusted me with something extraordinarily precious to him: the International Human Design School.

Ra died suddenly the following year.

I continued.

I taught. I studied. I helped preserve and transmit the knowledge as he wished. I wrote The Definitive Book of Human Design, which has since been translated into many languages. Human Design profoundly changed my own life, and I have had the privilege of watching it touch the lives of thousands of others.

For many years, Human Design was the center of my creative and intellectual world.

And then, slowly, something else began calling me.

Art. Painting.

At first, I thought of art and Human Design as two very different parts of my life. One was knowledge that can be complex, precise, deeply intellectual. The other was intuitive, tactile and mysterious. In the studio I wasn’t explaining anything. I was layering paint, sanding it away, making marks, responding, waiting, covering things up and discovering what wanted to remain.

But lately I’ve begun to wonder if these two parts of my life are really separate at all.

Perhaps I have been exploring the same questions all along.

Human Design asks us to consider what it means to live as ourselves. It teaches us about uniqueness, awareness, timing, surrender and the extraordinary intelligence of a life allowed to unfold according to its own nature.

When I look at my paintings, I see many of those same themes.

Stillness. Solitude. Passage. Waiting. Mystery. Time. Nature. Thresholds. The feeling of standing quietly before something much larger than ourselves.

My paintings often contain birds, water, horizons, moons, fragments of old maps and writing, weathered surfaces and things that seem to be emerging or disappearing. I have described what I am trying to create as evidence of spiritual presence, of the divine, of the majesty of existence.

Maybe Human Design and painting are simply two languages I have been given for exploring the same mystery.

For decades, I used words and knowledge.

Now, increasingly, I find myself wanting to say less and make something instead.

I don’t know exactly where these two worlds will meet. I don’t want to make paintings that illustrate Human Design or turn its concepts into symbols on a canvas. That feels too literal for me.

What interests me is something quieter.

What would it mean to make art informed by a lifetime of living this knowledge?

To paint waiting rather than explain it.

To paint stillness.

Recognition.

Timing.

Surrender.

The unknown.

The experience of simply being.

Perhaps this is the beginning of a new body of work. Perhaps it is simply the beginning of a new way of understanding the work I am already making.

There is also something deeply moving to me about where I find myself now.

Ra entrusted me with something he loved. I have spent many years carrying it, teaching it and helping preserve it for those who would come after him.

But lately another question has begun to emerge.

What has carrying this knowledge for all these years made possible in me?

I don’t know the complete answer yet.

But I have a feeling my paintings are part of it.

And perhaps this is where my next chapter begins, by allowing everything Human Design has taught me to find another language.

The language of art.