Visual Medicine - A Radically Transformative Creative Practice

Sitting at my desk in the exact moment of retrieving these words from my files… the light flows in speaking its own exquisite connective language. I take some photos - it retreats in the way all right-brain, ephemeral language does… flowing in and flowing out.

Below words from my book - “Visual Medicine - The Art of Unknown”.


“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift “ Albert Einstein


“We know from current neuroscience research that the right hemisphere of the brain is the hub of our capacity for new creative growth. I believe the right brain is the part of our mind that can also listen to the voice of Spirit because it is uniquely receptive to nonverbal communication. The right brain understands the world through relational associations – linking words and image, music, rhythm, tone and nuance – and tangential, complex, abstract, non-linear thought processes.

These abstract linkings of body memory, musicality and relationality cannot be arrived at through linear left-brain logic. These associations are drawn from thinking that is shaped at the edge of our awareness, not censored by the desire to trim outcome to a presupposed expectation.

These are truly new thoughts that arise in the moment from our spontaneous imagination and long to find a container or form through which they can be revealed, explored and understood. This is the potential moment of a paradigm shift of awareness and consciousness. This is the moment where we can receive new communication… “







Excerpt From: Suzette Clough. “Visual Medicine - The Art of Unknown”.

Most days - I paint - or I look at paintings. I feel an intense connection to the living world through looking at images. They do not appear flat to me - they sit in a field of connectedness to the animacy of all things.

These paintings emerged through the process I have come to call Visual Medicine™ - a profoundly simple, no-brush painting technique developed over years of painting and teaching. It is a way of listening, of allowing images to reveal themselves rather than constructing them with intention.

I never set out to paint a cave or a tidal wave, yet the image that arrives may evoke the dark interiority of an underground sea cave or the surging power of the ocean. The paintings are lifted from a pool of paint and water - moving, shifting, taking their own shape. They are not imposed, but invited into being.

This way of working echoes the Taoist understanding of how energy unfolds when left to its own natural flow. It is not about control but about witnessing what wants to come through.

I have come to understand that the universal creative energy present in all things longs to express itself - freely, without force. Visual Medicine™ is a practice of seeing and receiving, tracing the beauty of this living, creative force.

From my latest newsletter: Visual Prayers and Blessings...

We find ourselves in times of profound - even dire change. From political upheaval to climate emergency, these times call us to reconnect with our true root system, the one that anchors us in a deeper sense of belonging to Earth.

For me, working with paint and the practice of Visual Medicine is a way of growing visual roots - shaping and being shaped by a visceral language of connection and rootedness to others and to the world.

One way I want to share this language of connection—to the planet, to all living beings, and to our creative future - is by sending you a visual download of images each new moon. My newsletters will feature images and visual stories from my Visual Medicine™ practice and large painting archive. Occasionally, I’ll include nature photographs or glimpses of places that echo the visual patterns emerging in this month’s work.

These visual stories carry the spirit of illuminated art forms, like the tradition of icons or the mediaeval Book of Hours. Much like icons, which hold their own subliminal language, these paintings can also be seen as visual prayers. They speak in an abstract language that is both a petition and a dialogue with Creation.

As you scroll through this Vision Book, let the images speak to you. In times when old ways of seeing and problem-solving have worn thin, images can offer a new guide of visual contemplation and self-compassion.

When you sit with these paintings you may sense each image carrying the energy of a blessing. Allow the images to hold you, infuse you with the healing energy woven into the framework of the paintings - which is a kind of emergence from a source of creation itself.

If you’d like to receive more visual prayers and blessings into your inbox each New Moon...sign up for my newsletter in the links below...with the first link AND dive into a brilliantly immersive version of my newsletter in the form of a VISION BOOK in the second link.

My newsletter link is in the comments below...
I love sharing this because the format in which the newsletter is created is soooo visual and so delicious...It is like diving into a sea of pure colour and light! In these times filling ourselves with beauty that seeps into our souls is one of the most radically defiant acts against heterogeneity, misogyny and hegemony.
If you’d like to receive it in your inbox you can sign up via my website.

This is a sprinkling of the images..

NEW Course! Visual Medicine™ – Painting with the Ancestors
Starting January 28th, 2025

We are surrounded by our planetary Ancestors—from the air we breathe to the ground beneath our feet. We are the living outcome of every Ancestor who has ever been and those yet to come.

Imagine painting with this living field of co-creative Ancestors who long to speak with us as much as we long to listen to them…

Visual Medicine™ is a radically transformative painting practice developed over two decades. It connects us to our Ancestor roots, opening channels for multitudes of voices—Birth Kin, Plant allies, Mineral teachers, Animal guides, and Land Ancestors. Earth itself is a living visual language system—mycelial threads like veins beneath the soil, striated markings on tree bark, or the sweeping meander of rivers—each an ancient network of communication.

The stories that emerge through Visual Medicine™ are more than images; they are dialogues with the unseen forces and patterns that shape existence itself. These fragments of energy and meaning are vital threads in the world’s body—a tapestry waiting to be woven anew.

By witnessing, feeling, and allowing these visual stories to unfold, you join the sacred work of weaving coherence back into a fragmented world.

Are you ready to listen, to paint, and to be part of this living story?

There are 2 places left in this new course...the links are in the comments.

In our culture we are very used to approaching creativity as self-expression or therapeutic catharsis, but Visual Medicine operates in a different way. Visual Medicine™ doesn’t fit into conventional categories of art, therapy, or spirituality.

It asks each person to step into co-creation with something vast and unknown, which requires a willingness to surrender control of what you already know. This is not the lens for creativity that most of us have grown up with which was most likely predicated on skill, “getting it right” (or wrong!) and then having to do it again but even better.

Visual Medicine is the opposite of this. It is a practice for relating to the Emergent Creative Unknown where the New, our Renewal - can be born.

Visual Medicine isn’t just a creative technique - it’s a living, relational system that teaches through experience, subtlety, and working with the Unseen as a Teacher. It’s not easily explained or categorized. It’s not modelled after existing creative systems or frameworks. It emerges from a deep engagement with Creation itself. Its essence can’t easily be compared or aligned with more familiar methods of creativity or self-exploration.

VISUAL MEDICINE - PAINTING WITH THE ANCESTORS is now enrolling starting in January 2025.

The next Visual Medicine™ Facilitator Training is now enrolling for March 2025. Check out the links for my website in my bio. You are welcome to message me to arrange a time for an exploratory conversation about the Facilitator training.

In our culture we are very used to approaching creativity as self-expression or therapeutic catharsis, but Visual Medicine operates in a different way. Visual Medicine™ doesn’t fit into conventional categories of art, therapy, or spirituality.

It asks each person to step into co-creation with something vast and unknown, which requires a willingness to surrender control of what you already know. This is not the lens for creativity that most of us have grown up with which was most likely predicated on skill, “getting it right” (or wrong!) and then having to do it again but even better.

Visual Medicine is the opposite of this. It is a practice for relating to the Emergent Creative Unknown where the New, our Renewal - can be born.

Visual Medicine isn’t just a creative technique - it’s a living, relational system that teaches through experience, subtlety, and working with the Unseen as a Teacher. It’s not easily explained or categorized. It’s not modelled after existing creative systems or frameworks. It emerges from a deep engagement with Creation itself. Its essence can’t easily be compared or aligned with more familiar methods of creativity or self-exploration.

VISUAL MEDICINE - PAINTING WITH THE ANCESTORS is now enrolling starting in January 2025.

The next Visual Medicine™ Facilitator Training is now enrolling for March 2025. Check out the links for my website in my bio. You are welcome to message me to arrange a time for an exploratory conversation about the Facilitator training.

As we draw closer to the eve of Samhain we can step beyond linear time and notions of separateness and speak directly with The Ancestors. On this night, tradition encourages us to communicate with Spirits and The Dead as if they really existed.

In many indigenous cultures speaking with the Ancestors, The Dead or Spirit is part of a vibrant cultural life that exists in continual communication with an alive nature-filled world which also wants to be in conversation with us. In this world view we are co-participants and co-creators.

What if we were to keep speaking with these invisible worlds not just for one night, but as a real practice - a creative spiritual practice. What if we were able to hold conversations which allow us to unfold WITH the resources of Creation, Spirit and the Ancestors?

Many years ago now, I was painting in my studio feeling a particularly knotty problem tugging painfully at my insides. I found myself calling out, asking for help from anyone or anything that would listen. In that moment, as I watched the paint swirl and unfurl in cloud-like tendrils, I felt an answer rise from the painting itself: Spirit loves to be made material.

In that moment I had an embodied experience of the painting having a voice as guide and inner teacher - Visual Medicine - a radically creative practice slipped through the invisible portal and into the world.

If you feel intrigued by what it means to find other ways of listening to invisible worlds through paint - I am offering a new Visual Medicine™ group PAINTING WITH THE COSMOS starting November 5th. Over five weeks we will tap into, explore, ask questions and receive answers by learning to paint with Visual Medicine. There are 3 places left.

Sessions take place online. You don't need an art studio - you can paint at your kitchen table, under a tree or sitting on a cushion on the floor. We will be meeting every Tuesday from November 5th to December 3rd - live on Zoom. All sessions will be recorded.

I NEVER use brushes. Theses paintings "arrive" as full communications/communinings.

No painting experience is necessary. Just come as you are.
Link in my Bio. xo

I am writing something for something else...when I came across these words from my website: suzetteclough.com - and I AM soooo MOVED...these paintings were/are so deeply touching in how the material world lives in us all....all the time - we don't have to DO anything. WE are all bodies filled with the periodic table.

"When I created these paintings - OUR BODIES ARE THE PERIODIC TABLE - I could not believe how these paintings created themselves. I have been painting for over five decades - I know what happens when I put a certain colour with another colour, or a certain type of paint with another substance. I know that inks might leave a slightly shiny surface, I know how water might affect the image when I flood the paper with it...and then of course I don't know. Because the real creator is not me. I am witness + collaborator, co-participant and co-mingler to energies that are both mine and not.

When I am painting, I am, what ecologist and Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy calls a "flow-through". I am completely and utterly with myself whilst being in another space/time/dimension bringing through akashic memory of other bodies, other places, other times. In all of one moment I am with all the energies that have ever been and yet to become -and still on my knees crouching on the floor in my studio with buckets of watery pigments, spray bottles of ink, jars of dust and lots of paper towel..."

You can join my website newsletter with the link below...

Creativity is not about what we make, or what we do, it's an essential quality that lives within us - it always has, it always will.
Our breath is an act of creation.
Our heartbeat is an act of creation.
Our thoughts and feelings are acts of creation.
Our very cells reverberate with the same patterns as the genesis of the Universe. We are made of the same complex luminous fabric. Once we know this, truly - in every shining filigree of our Being - we can never go back to not knowing our radical interconnectedness.

Solstice Blessings... to you!

COSMOGENESIS
The worlds in becoming.

Over the 20 years that I have been painting in this way I have understood it as a way of offering space for Spirit/s to speak. I believe that over many years I can see I have been working with many hands and with many differing styles. Even though the technique never changes the content and style are in constant change with the change of spirit hands and information. I have had many visually transformative moments - sometimes with the felt sense of a voice - when an image speaks and disappears back into the paint - many of my spiritual experiences have occurred through this way of working.

This form of mystical painting has a history of other women artists who have been called to hold the space open for what wants to come through. I'm thinking of Hilda Af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, Emma Kunz who were creative mediums from early 20thc. The 'language' that comes through the paintings is also subject to the physical properties and limitations of paint itself. If you image trying to paint 'something' with a garden hose pouring paint - that is the likelihood of creating an image that contains articulated content.

Having painted for over 50 years - IT IS an extraordinary feat for Spirit/s to bring through literal images that we can 'understand'. Now, after many years I understand that the most natural language of Spirit/s is Abstract - for this is the language of the natural world. It is the language that the world speaks to us through tree patterns, leaves, rocks, clouds, cells - the micro/macro language of our bodies and the body of the Cosmos.

COSMOGENESIS
A series of 50 original paintings created through the memory of Deep Time
150 cm x 125cm
Giant watercolour paper. graphite powder, inks, gold dust, copper dust + SPIRIT + ENERGY

THIS!

THE COLOUR OF VENUS THE COLOUR OF VENUS Paintings by Suzette Clough THE LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS VOLUME #3 THE COLOUR OF VENUS VOLUME #3 Paintings and images are how the Alchemists passed along their secrets... - Clarke Strand - Welcome to THE LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS. These vision books are a contemporar...

I’m working on my next Vision Book for my ongoing project - THE LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS. These vision books are a contemporary version of illuminated manuscripts - immersive and written mostly with images they are created in the alchemical lineage of artists as healers and storytellers of the Soul. In the words of Clarke Strand "paintings and images are how alchemists passed along their secrets..."

To enter the secret world of visual alchemy you can subscribe to THE LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS and receive my next vision book - THE COLOUR OF VENUS. Go to my website with link below and subscribe to my newsletter - or ping me a message and I will sign you up with your email.

"As I came to understand that my paintings were speaking to me, I began to understand that Visual Medicine itself was an oracle with its own voice. I realized that the practice of Visual Medicine was a process of orienteering, enabling me to see where I am, allowing whatever is waiting within me to arise. It was calling me to uncover my inner conversation so I could hear my deeper Self, and what I have come to call the Oracle Mind.

In ancient times, Oracles were the shamans and healers of the tribe: a priestess, like the Sibylline oracle at Delphi, or medicine person to whom the group turned for guidance. They were often elders who were able to read signs from the natural world, offering counsel from the deep bank of collective wisdom. ‘oracle’ is also associated with entering an altered state of mind in order to receive spiritual guidance or direction from the gods or other mysterious source. Summoning the Oracle was putting a call out to the mystery, the archetypal, something bigger than us – the universal mind that can speak to us. The Oracle was standing in for God or the gods on earth. The Oracle, through the oracular state of consciousness, was speaking as their emissary.

An Oracle could also be an object or device, like divining bones or runic stones. They were used when individuals, families, tribes, and even whole cultures, were seeking to find answers through the anxious cracks that the feeling of uncertainty brings. Oracles were assumed to be predictive, but I believe the true purpose of an oracle is not to predict the future but to bring oneself wholly into the present. When we are in the present we can truly listen, see and feel what is being communicated from the world around us and within us, to which we are intricately and intrinsically connected. When you meet your Oracle Mind you meet the part of yourself which can speak from this universal intelligence. You meet your inner shaman, wise person, elder – your Self.

In neuroscience terms, the Oracle Mind might be described as the intuitive part of the mind, related to the functions of the right hemisphere of the brain. Artists and writers might call it the visionary mind and those in spiritual circles, the mystical mind. The Oracle Mind is also the poet-mind, which longs to find soulful truth and meaning in the difficult-to-understand currents and direction of our unfolding life. It is the curious mind that is sprinkled with questions, longing to find answers in hidden places and all kinds of cracks. It does not look for the straightforward but reveals its thinking through what is encoded in our not-quite-conscious perceptions.

Without a relationship to the mystery we are truly lost ...

The Oracle Mind operates with guileless curiosity and we know the veracity of the answers that arise from this enquiry by the way the body sighs and receives them with a deep feeling of cellular yes. I call this experience ‘oracular’ because it has a voice that can direct and give guidance, like the I-Ching, the Tarot or Runes. Unlike these ancient collective oracles, however, this guidance is so personal it can only be heard by listening to the sound of your own inner voice...."

From VISUAL MEDICINE - THE ART OF THE UNKNOWN
Suzette Clough

EARTH is the second book in the ongoing series of vision books I am creating for THE LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS. Over time, I hope the library shelves will be brimming with stories you can dip into to explore the healing realms of Spirit + Matter.

"We didn't arrive here by ourselves. No one did.

If we travel far enough back, we will meet each other as dust particles in the nanosecond after the Universe exploded into life. We were there as the Universe birthed itself into billions of stars. We were there as the body of Gaia formed into The Blue Planet that we call Earth."

- Suzette Clough

From:
VISION BOOKS -
EARTH #2




CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW AND IMMERSE IN A VISUAL BOOK

https://visual-healing-library.shorthandstories.com/the-library-of-visual-healing-books-volume-two/index.html

Perdita Finn
Andrea Mathieson

EARTH STORIES is the second book in my ongoing series of vision books that I am creating for THE LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS.

Over time, I hope the library shelves will be brimming with stories that can be drawn upon any time you need to dip into "the well" and explore the healing realms of the Spirit + Matter.

"We didn't arrive here by ourselves. No one did.

Each one of us, was born through the body of our Mother, even if we had a difficult relationship with our Mother, even if we didn’t know our particular Mother. Not one of us arrived here alone or without the cooperation of trillions upon trillions of Mothers. We are part of a complex interconnecting web of matrilineal circles of Ancestor lines which each of us can trace through Earth's evolution...."

The world comes alive in creative co-participation with each other - thank you so much for being here.

I would soooo love to send you this new volume from the LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS... Please sign up via my Visual Medicine website to receive a FREE copy!
The link is below and in my BIO.

Part of my creative mission as an artist and teacher is to find ways of sharing "PAINTING" as an embodied visual language that resonates and transforms in the body of the viewer. Some thirty plus years ago this deep core desire lead me to train as a body-centred psychotherapist. Finding ways of connecting to the Soul that lives within our bodies is one of the things that drives me. We are a resonance chamber for that has been and all that can still evolve through us and re-cohere to the integral patterns held within the body of the world and our own bodies. This allows for a profound reintegration with the originating patterns of the Earth. Creativity is not just "play" - it offers us a place to remember ourselves fully rewoven into the original patterns of Creation itself.

I've been working on an immersive digital library of visual books - The Library of Visual Healing Books. Each month I will place a new volume on the imaginal shelves of The Library.

Immerse by subscribing to my newsletter and receive digital books straight into your inbox each month (you can sign up in the comments below)

Thank you for being here. The world comes to life in creative co-participation.

From my first the digital book...click on the link below and immerse.

ANCESTOR STORIES
Before Human was born, we inhabited the Cosmos as energy patterns evolving through the bodies of stars birthed into the vast body of the world.

We are all part of the unfolding long story of Anima Mundi...

https://visual-healing-library.shorthandstories.com/the-library/index.html

THE LIBRARY OF VISUAL HEALING BOOKS ANCESTOR STORIES Volume One - from the Library of Visual Healing Books By Suzette Clough

"We are surrounded by our planetary Ancestors - from the air we breathe to the ground we walk on. We are the outcome of every Ancestor who has ever been, and is yet to come. We are part of, and connected to a living field of co-creative Ancestors who long to speak with us as much as we long to speak with them."

"I am a flow-through of matter, energy, and information, which is transformed in turn by my own experiences and intentions…"

Joanna Macy – World as Lover, World as Self

These paintings are part of a body of work I am developing called COSMOGENISIS - a series of 50 paintings that reflect the beginning of the Cosmos and draw upon the energetic imprint of our Ancestors of Origin.

COSMOGENISIS
Series of 50
150cm x 125cm
Watercolour paper 400gsm, graphite, ink, gold dust, copper dust + WATER + SPIRIT