Giora Carmi
Born in Israel in 1944, a second son. Later a sister was adopted into the family.
Grew up in a small village called Kfar Malal.
Lost his father who was killed while fighting in Israel’s War of Independence (1948).
Married in 1965. Later had two daughters and one son.
Fulfilled his obligatory army service. Had a series of spiritual experiences throughout life.
Discovered his ability to “read” art. Discovered Zen.
Studied Graphic Design at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
Was a freelance graphic designer and illustrator for 14 years.
Taught illustration and typography. Wrote and illustrated for the children’s magazine, Pilon.
Came to the US in 1985 where he was a freelance illustrator in NYC for 17 years.
Illustrated regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, as well as others.
Illustrated, both in Israel and the US, 42 children’s books, two of which he also wrote.
Studied Zen for 12 years with the late Chinese Zen master Shen-yen.
Studied Art Therapy at NYU.
Worked as an Art Therapist for 14 years. Developed a new approach to art therapy while doing two internships in a county jail. Later, after further development of the method, wrote the book, “Opening Intuitive Flow Through Artwork”.
Studied the Release Technique, Theta Healing, Reiki, and a few other approaches to human development.
In 2020 he published the illustrated book “Who AM I?”, as a humorous but practical aid to self reflection.
In 2023 he published the book “PAINTINGS that read my mind & POEMS that read my paintings”
These days he lives in NYC with his partner Anita Gold, where he paints, writes prose, poetry and nonfiction, including the blog “Intuitive Flow”
Giora, your art-making process is closely intertwined with spiritual practices and meditation. Could you elaborate on how the subtle energetic experiences from your meditation sessions translate directly into visual form, and what specific challenges or revelations you encounter in this delicate translation?
Meditation and art making are two ways to reach the activity of these energies and become a witness to them.
What is this energetic activity?
It is how my psyche responds to the experiences that come to visit me. An experience can be anything. Something that I saw, heard, touched or remembered. Our subconscious goes through these experiences and immediately chooses what to relate to and what to discard, based on decisions of the past. But when you become a witness, you catch the experiences before they are sifted through by the subconscious. And you catch the activities of the subconscious.
Every thought creates an emotional experience. This is how it feels when energy is moving in the body. These are the subtle energies that I become a witness to, both through meditation and art making.
If my witnessing is deep, I avoid the emotional responses to everything and become peaceful. Being that peaceful, I can start experiencing the infinite field, sometimes called the quantum field, out of which everything that exists comes. This is also where creativity comes from, and intuition, and beauty. Art comes from there. Art, as I see it, is the native language of the truth. I call this infinite field: Truth. It always responds to everything in a way that helps you evolve. Where does evolution go? It leads to experiencing the life that we live from the perspective of the truth, which means that we have more love and wisdom. That’s it in short.
In a way, going deeper into myself it is like changing the frequency of reception on a radio dial. There are multiple radio frequencies in my room. When I change the frequency of reception, my radio shifts its listening mode from focusing on the station I am on, and starts to decipher the signals of a different station.
When I make art I have no aim, except for following my individual sense of beauty. That’s all I do. This brings me quite fast to an intuitive flow, which is the deeper state, from which I can experience the subtler energies. The lines and the areas of color that I make are interpretations, like in Jazz, of what I experience.
Adding the colors is like adding the harmony to a tune that is already there. And through the whole process the composition is built. The composition for me is the most important part. This is how everything works together with everything else. The composition holds the meaning of the whole piece.
In your statement, you mention creating small artworks to facilitate an intimate connection with viewers. How do you envision this intimacy influencing the viewer's internal exploration, and how does scale specifically serve as a medium for deeper spiritual dialogue?
Standing and moving around is so painful to me these days, that I choose to do everything sitting at my table. This is the main reason for my small paintings. I think that what encourages inner looking in the viewers is the art itself, the composition, the effects of the lines and the colors, the daring compositions sometimes, the delicate balances. I’d say also that the spiritual aspect is attractive to those who experience their lives in similar ways. The importance of the space in the paintings, the feeling that what happens in the art work is part of infinity. People who are open and sensitive to these things may find my art interesting in spite of the small size. Maybe even inspiring? Maybe the paintings are like haiku poems? They do come from what other people too encounter in their spiritual practices. My paintings won’t fit the job of decorating a big room on their own, unless you create some dramatic placement of the pictures. But they can be hung in a study room or anywhere in the house where people can look from a close distance, and when they are not in a hurry. Maybe the paintings are, I’d like to think, like little wild flowers. They have not been domesticated, to influence by being bigger and stronger, but they are truly wild. The truth of who we are is hiding in them.
Also, I paint as my spiritual practice and this size is enough for that.
You described your artworks as culminating not only visually but also poetically. How does poetry expand or transform the viewer's interpretation of your visual works, and have you noticed instances where the poetry reshaped your own understanding of your artwork?
When I paint, I do not know what I paint. I encounter my inner events, on purpose, as experiences without stories. But they all have stories. Writing about what I see in my own paintings, after they are finished, helps me know the contents. And this helps me understand myself. This way of painting places me as a witness in the place where my attitudes to living are being created and this makes it possible to choose differently.
I used to write about my art in prose, but the writing, sometimes somehow turned into poems and I started to like this very much. It actually felt like a relief. All the writing that I am doing here in this interview is not an ideal way to describe art. It is a description, but not art, and it is not the same thing. So I feel much better when the description is art too.
Writing poems is making art. And in art there is more wisdom, because it comes from that infinite field of creation and being. Only this deeper view allows the release of mental programs. You cannot release them as long as you are on the same level where they operate. You have to go beyond.
Considering your extensive experience as an art therapist, how has facilitating intuitive art-making in others influenced or reshaped your own artistic methodologies and personal practice?
What I described above is what I taught my clients to do. I helped them with the reading of the art. I never needed the diagnostic material that sometimes I had access to, because the art itself used to reveal everything that interfered with happiness. In both the art that my clients made and in their poems two things were presented to them: Their unique natural flow and what stood in the way of this natural, authentic flow.
An example of an amazing thing is that when you are in a flow, you cannot be sad or depressed. The flow itself is happy. So a person that was diagnosed with depression was free of it during the sessions. I saw this happen many times. Then, as they did more sessions, the tendency to create depressive thought patterns was reduced and did not have the power to create depression.
I have had the condition that creates the pain that I have in my feet for many years. And since nothing else helped, I decided to use my own method to discover what was standing in the way of my own health. This is how I came to the way that I make art now. The discovery of the flow and the impediments to the flow is all that is needed for spiritual evolution too.
Maybe I can represent this idea more clearly with an example:
When we are in a creative flow, it is like the river of our energy is flowing trough our actions onto the paper, in my case. This stream of authenticity goes trough all of our thought patterns, and these serve as a sieve. What is pure authenticity passes through the sieve like water. Habitual thought patterns are caught by the sieve. Both of these parts show up on the paper. The authentic part creates beauty and a composition that “works”. The thought patterns that appear interfere with this flow. They appear in the art as general tendencies that spoil the composition and as local spots that do not “work” well.
The writing finds both parts. The flowing parts feel really good, when you look at them. The debris of thought patterns disturbs. Being still in the state of flow, the painter deciphers his/her suffering in the not-flowing parts and it is natural in this state to choose not to suffer. Based on this experience, the painter chooses to change his/her tendencies.This is how inner, real change happens, based on our free will.
In normal daily life when we meet with difficulties or things that do not work, we suffer and struggle. But when we meet these same inner events, while coming from a deeper viewpoint, we find the beauty in them. Finding this view in itself is healing. And writing about these encounters clarifies and helps the potential change to happen. This is what I do. So the more clear I became of how my method for healing works, the more enthusiastic I felt about using it for myself.
Your recent exploration with Prismacolor pencils signifies a notable shift in medium and technique. Can you describe how this particular medium uniquely aligns with your intuitive approach and spiritual exploration?
Using these pencils was in the beginning of my self healing path, some five years ago. Later I started using gouache for the color areas. Originally I thought of using oil paints in different consistencies. But working with oil requires the use of turpentine ,which turned out to be something I became allergic to. I used to make silk screen printing with oil based inks and discovered my allergy.
These specific color pencils, when pressed hard, create a layer that has some characteristics of oil paint. This is why I chose them at first. But I kept experimenting with other paints and found that gouache gave me more of what I wanted. Gouache is more flexible in creating different degrees of transparency, and it was more alive for me, and better for giving form to the energies that I met in myself. It is also closer to the water colors with which I drew the lines.
Your life has undergone significant transformations from graphic designer to illustrator, art therapist, and now deeply intuitive artist. How do you perceive continuity or evolution of self across these distinct careers, and how have past artistic identities informed your current intuitive practice?
It was a process of becoming more and more precise in what I wanted to do. Through graphic design I learned to be instrumental and practical with my compositions and colors. A design has to effectively deliver a specific message. I also had to come up with ideas and this was a lead toward illustration. Illustration was more alive for me and I started to see that I enjoyed places in the illustrations that if I isolated them, they looked like abstract paintings. I also made fine art all the time and it felt better and more free. The zen training connected me more profoundly to the awareness of these energies within me, and it started to be crucial to make them central to my activity. My involvement with art therapy showed me how this play with the subtle energies relates to healing and evolution.
You emphasize the importance of "line" in your current work. Could you elaborate on the symbolic and spiritual significance of lines in your art and how the spontaneous nature of watercolor influences your intuitive creative process?
If I had to do only one thing, it would be the lines. For a reason that is beyond me lines are my best way to express what I experience. That’s the simple answer. And the quality of the line is very important to me. It has to be alive. the transparency and endless flexibility of watercolors helps. The unexpected happenings as I paint the lines also help. I feel more comfortable when the lines are not sharp and final, as this makes them more expressions of a strong will, or opinion. I want them to happen and be surprising and interesting to me. If the lines are not flexible and open to the unexpected, they don’t “talk” to me and I lose interest in making them. So the act of making art is like a conversation. You state your point of view or the way that you represent your experience, and the line answers with more than what I put into it. In the next line you try again, and the line expands what you wanted to “say” once more. That’s a worthy conversation for me. It keeps me aware and awake.
As you work intuitively and your art-making is often a meditative act, how do you discern when a piece has reached completion, and what signals or inner confirmations guide you to this moment?
If I do anything by following my sense of beauty, there comes a moment when this individual sense of beauty tells me to stop, because any addition will cause the painting to be less beautiful to me. It is a clear feeling. Sometimes it surprises me quite early, and I trust it. I leave the art work alone for the night and in the next day I confirm that whatever is in it is enough to fulfill me. It has wonder. Did I do this, I feel like asking ? How did it happen? How come that there is so much beauty in it?
And sometimes I feel that I want to add something. A little thing, and it becomes even better. And there had been a few times when I threw the pieces away.
And at other times the addition changes everything and I need to do more. Then I realize that what I did yesterday was good for yesterday. Today I am different and to be true to now I need to change the painting.
When I am sure that the painting is finished, I sign and wash the palette. I want to create new mixtures for every new painting. I want the palette to be open for anything new that may appear in my imagination.
Your blog, IntuitiveFlow.org, has created an accessible space for viewers to experience your art and poetry together. What have you discovered through sharing this interconnected experience online, and how has audience interaction shaped your ongoing creative journey?
When I started this blog it was from art therapy perspective. I just started it and did nothing to publicize it. People discovered it and I had close to 400 subscribers, who would get new entries in their emails automatically. When I started to write poems instead of prose analyses of my art, many of my subscribers left the blog. There are less people who like poetry than those who like prose analysis of art. And maybe it has to do with the spiritual focus that has become more emphasized?
On the other hand, the blog sends my new entries to Facebook, instagram and Neighborhoods Network, and I get many more reactions from these. Maybe it s just a different audience.
In any case these don’t bother me. I do what feels true to me, and those who need it find it. It is enough. It is more than I hoped for. And as you said, it provides a place where people can see the poems with the art.
Living with physical limitations due to illness has clearly intensified your artistic output and inner exploration. Could you discuss how these physical constraints have influenced your spiritual practices, creative priorities, and the inherent meanings embedded within your recent artworks?
All the things that I knew about the power of this kind of art making, that I used in the past for helping many others are now helping me and prove themselves again and again to be effective, as I knew. I knew in the past and wrote about it, that this kind of work is meditation, and a spiritual path, in addition to being a great psychological method. Now the spiritual aspect has become the main focus. And I keep discovering that one’s spiritual path is nothing else but what one want to do more than anything else. What comes the most naturally and even easily, and what one feels the most comfortable sharing with others, is what his spiritual path is.
Also, along this path every painting and poem is a discovery of an aspect of the truth, or let me call it an aspect of a deeper truth that we cannot encounter without walking our individual path. It takes me through the discovery of who I am, step by step.
And one of these things is this: When you have pain, the tendency is to concentrate on trying to get rid of it. This is a narrow focus. But the essence of healing is that you see a wider and wiser perspective. You disconnect from the story content of everything, that keeps you in a narrow focus, and become a witness to the energetic aspect of everything. You discover the beauty, the relationship to everything else, the endlessness, the wondrous field of consciousness within which we exist, out of which we appear and into which we disappear all the time. This tangible view creates an environment of healing, where the way the body keeps being re-created returns to its healthy way of becoming.
In the video, you describe the simultaneous emergence of paintings and poems. How does this synchronicity reveal new dimensions or deepen the original inspiration for both art forms?
The art emerges first. The lines come as the pioneers and they have a compositional aspect to them. The colors come next, and for me they are the harmony that comes to accompany and give relevance or context to the lines. Then the compositional aspect of the whole starts to be the most important and it is how the art piece comes to its conclusion.
Then I start the poem process that also has the events and the context in it, but this time in a language. I think the use of words makes the art a little more accessible, but it is still an art form too, and not an explanation.
Your poems seem to serve as gateways into your paintings. Can you discuss the relationship between the visual and poetic elements, and how you balance openness to interpretation with guiding the viewer’s experience?
I remember the first Zen book that I read: Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. I think it is by Paul Reps. It s a compilation of three books. One of them is The Gate-less Gate. It has many short passages that are Koans, which are questions that you cannot answer logically, and therefore will push you to search beyond logic. These passages are accompanied by short poems that are called Mumon’s Comments. The poems are supposed to help the Zen practitioner decipher the koans. When I read the book I realized that these poems cannot be understood logically, just like the passages that they came to illuminate. I think this was the inspiration for my poems writing after the paintings. But in my case, because I am not as advanced as Mumon, many of my poems can be understood, and they help get a feeling of what the paintings are about. But being poems, they remain open for the unexpected mind and heart adventures of the readers.
Can you provide an example where a poem you wrote after completing a painting unexpectedly reshaped your perception of the artwork itself?
It is always so. The art that I do does not come from thinking.I have no plan. I look at the paper and find where the first line wants to be. I allow all that I do in the art to appear to me. So I do not know what it is about. I have some thoughts during the process. Like: Oh, this looks like.…. or: I want this darker. But I don’t go to what is this about? I allow forms and colors to appear as if they want to be there. It is a strange thing, I realize. We are used to plan before we do. But many artists, in all areas of art, talk about this same process. It is as if I am not the one who makes the art.
When I write, it is usually the first time during the whole process that I start to know something about the meaning or the content. The painting has more in it than what comes out in the poem, but the poem is about what is important to me in that moment.
Here is an example.
Healing, 2025, Watercolor + gouache + pencil, 23.5 x 21.2 cm
I did the lines, and the color areas came to me one after the others, I dealt with balance as the last few steps and was satisfied with the knowing that it was finished. I left it on the table for the night. I woke up in that night from the pain and saw that I was too awake for sleep. I got up and came to the table to look at what I made. It surprised me by being lighter in colors than my other recent paintings.
I started to describe for myself what I saw. I saw figures walking downhill. The big light green area seemed as if the sun was shining on it from the side, and something made a long shadow, The walking figures had clouds in their background that were arising into the air. When I wrote all of my impressions, with some reshaping, the figures became dreams and it became this poem:
Still half asleep
The dreams begin
To walk downhill
Early rays of sun
Caress the grass
With fingertips
And wafts of clouds
Arise into the air
To disappear.
I realized that the poem was about healing. Healing, when it comes from the depth of ourselves, happens when we let go of our dependence on the results of what is happening, and it turns to be just beauty.
I decided to call the poem HEALING.
And since, in my experience, it was not me who did the whole thing, I decided to see it as a message about me and my pain.
I think this is a good example of how the writing does not change the understanding but puts a light on it from an unexpected perspective.
How do your paintings and poems mutually inform one another during your creative process? Is there ever a moment when the visual and written expressions conflict or challenge each other?
There is no conflict. But the art can be interpreted in a different way. In another time the poem can be very different. This happens. Sometimes I feel that the poem has not expressed the art correctly, or has not gone deep enough yet. I try again, and sometimes I try a few times. I do not leave the process until the poem feels right, just as I feel about the painting. You can say, until it surprises me and makes me wonder.
Have viewers shared experiences where the combination of your paintings and poems led to personal insights or emotional breakthroughs? Could you describe one particularly memorable interaction?
Where I live, there is a group of elders that I belong to. We meet once a week through Zoom to talk about just anything, like what friends do. They always ask me to show my last painting and read the poem that belongs to it. They like it a lot and always find things in the art that relate to the poem. And I am always happy to show what in the art gave me the ideas that are expressed in the poem. This is also true with other people to whom I show the paintings/poems. I find that when people try to find the connection between the two, they end up paying a lot more attention to some of the abstract ingredients of the art, and to how the different elements of the painting work with each other to create an experience. This means that they go deeper into themselves. Knowing this feels very good to me.