Image: Not a Sunflower, by Dr Dwayne Wannamarra Kennedy.

Seeking your real, it’s a journey

Well really, at one level just being real and personal is so important in this moment.

I mean this generally – every moment is valuable when we are true to ourselves. So, this is the therapeutic awareness.

At another level the art itself is beautiful, and every piece has a deep story that is compelling. Art is transformative in this sense.

And so, then the therapy-as-experiential-growth is itself very mysterious. Very often this reality and experience are not well represented in media, so there is a lot of room to create insight.

Seeking the Deeper

What is therapy actually? How does it operate? Can I activate that in other ways? These are interesting questions.

It is interesting because in part, I’ve felt like in our career we were moving into art exclusively and retiring from careers in therapy.

But as we lean more into the arts project we are pulled even more deeply into therapeutic insights. The art is in fact profoundly moving and a catalyst for change and transformation.

This is a radical insight for me.

As a therapist to be honest I was wanting to simply sell our artworks. And sure, they are incredibly beautiful and have very strong cultural and spiritual values and narratives. We could ostensibly simply sell artworks as a self-representing gallery operation. Oz FineArt was conceived to carry this functionality forward. But what is emerging that leads us to Substack - to support a community of art lovers and collectors - is something quite unique and different from art sales.

From Depth to Realisation - Art is So Transformative!

This literally took 9 months of gestation.

The deeper we went into curating the Oz FineArt gallery, the more we realised that around our Certificates of Authenticity, Custodial Provenance, and Narrative Significance is an emerging cultural value-set related to meaningful relationships.

These relationships in sheer potential drew us back to our early years - to why we first felt the call to be artists and therapists.

This calling expresses far more than the artworks themselves - and so much more than selling them. In fact, we do not sell art at all. We curate relationships of communal custodianship. We share values, stories, and sacred medicine. Art as a commodity is simply a small part of this actual picture.

May Calling as an Art Curator & Collector

My gawd. From just wanting to retire from therapy to realising that art itself is incredibly culturally therapeutic. Deeply familial. Totally embracing of human depth and relationship. Wow. Full circle, or what?

So this dramatically changed my perception of the nature of the works. The art changed from items to sell into artefacts of cultural and meaning-based significance.

This is a story-level reality that needs to be articulated. It is often overlooked – because the story is hard to express. It is also at the core of luxury narratives - these never rely on the transactional nature of sales. Luxury culture always rests on relationships of value, exchanging of energy and the deeper and ancient notions of fair-trade.

Luxury Narratives Rely on Value & Relationship

This value-set of quality and culture is central to our curatorial project. We seek and deeply desire to more fully understand the artefacts in light of their historical and contextual relationships. And to build into new relationships with collectors an inherent sense of empowerment to become cultural custodians. 

Acquiring our art is not about buying the art per se - it is about taking on a cultural and familial role that is build within communal resonance, an ancient and modern connection, and hope for our future generations.

What we came to describe sounds like a powerful and authentic approach that could really resonate with many people – but we did not have a place to engage. We felt this blog on our website was not enough. And ironically, this has shifted over time once we ventured outward - those efforts brought us back home here to this place. Sometimes what we have is enough, we just need to realise this and to build the home into a place of beauty and colour.

Nurturing Narratives and Stories

As we searched the internet for ways to create community, Substack emerged as a possible location. Substack felt like a numinous space, in which value exchange and curatorial insights might be shared. It has proven over the past couple of months to nurture deep connections with other substackers - some recovering from chronic illness an others seeking real human bonds of communication.

What we learned so far from our time on Substack is that the intersection of personal artistic practice and therapeutic insight creates multiple layers of value - the visual beauty of the art, the personal stories behind each piece, and the transformational insights that emerge from the creative process.

We reflected that our prior insight that therapy is mysterious and often not well represented in media highlights a real opportunity – a curatorial and cultural need in fact to bring to light something that is often overlooked.

Hidden and Secret-to-Public Wisdom

Many people are curious about therapeutic processes but find traditional presentations either too clinical or too superficial. Our lived experience as both practitioners and artists gives us a unique lens to make these concepts accessible and compelling.

The fact that diving deeper into art is actually pulling us back into therapeutic insights suggests this isn't just a career pivot - it's an evolution that integrates both aspects of expertise.

This is really a hard-won experience over many years.

This authentic journey originating here on this website could become part of our wider Substack and publication's narrative, showing readers, art lovers, and collectors how creativity and healing intersect in real time.

Of course, as of today we are already producing a YouTube show called The Artist's Journey, which links to a Podcast on Substack and Apple - more on these in future posts. You can get these direct to your inbox by signing up below.

We are also tentatively venturing into Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, and reluctantly pondering a page on Facebook... all of which seems like necessities in this day and age where having a media presence online means you exist - or at least helps like minded souls to connect - we live in hope...

 

Jo Bowers PhD is an artist, gallery owner, therapist, and business director with many years experience. He cofounded Oz FineArt with Dwayne Kennedy PhD to share their art culture and spirituality legacy, with beautiful works on canvas and in ceramics.

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This article is adapted and updated 15-11-25, and appears in another incarnation on Art Wisdom substack here.