By Fayra Teeters

SICA-USA is very happy to announce the following artists’ images were selected to grace our first annual Calendar:

Cover: Anna Schroeder watercolor: Flowers 1.

January: John Tjia photograph: Oakland Evening

February: Hannah Parshall watercolor: Winter Stream

March: Camille Hofvendahl watercolor: Hoop Dance

April: Suryadi Mai photograph: FUGI Japan

May: Damon Hyldreth sculpture: FEUER

June: Michael Barber photograph: Canadian Rockies

July: Lucian Parshall photograph: Blackbilled Mountain Toucan

August: Aminah Herrman painting: Quan Yin, The Embrace

September: Lorraine Arden sculpture: Kiss that Wakes the Sleeping Soul

October: Lawrence Pevec mixed media: Next in Order

November: Alexa Wichert photograph: The Feast

December: Geoffrey Armes painting: Fenris and Christ Fennsee

This Calendar will be available for preview and advanced ordering in the SICA Gallery at the National Congress, slated for July 2 – July 5, 2026 in Portland, Oregon

In the weeks to come, SICA-USA will publish articles featuring our amazing Subud Artists, and in their own words, delve into how they channel the Latihan into their creative flow, as well as their guidance in propagating their art into the world at large.

How I Got into Subud and Became an Artist

By Damon Hyldreth

My first experience with being moved by a higher power was four years before I ever heard the word Subud. 

During my first semester in college, my best friend said to me, “let’s take Sculpture” I replied: “Why would I want to do that?” He said “It’s figure sculpture in clay. All you do is look at naked people and play with clay and everyone gets an A”. This sounded like a course I could deal with. The professor was great and taught us to not only to look with our eyes but also to feel with our hands. I was bad at figure sculpture, but on the last day of the semester, I had an experience that changed my life.

That day the professor said, “Today the model will hold the same pose for the whole hour, and you can make anything that you want – it doesn’t have to be realistic”. As I began to work the soft moist clay, a strange feeling came over me, and I was suddenly in another realm. An invisible energy was coursing through me and moving my hands without my input. My vision changed and the whole room went pitch black except for the model and the clay. It felt wonderful. After 15 minutes, I looked at the clock over the model and realized that only 4 minutes had passed. I thought “I am outside of time, this is amazing”. When the period was over, things returned to normal and I had a

misshapen blob of clay in front of me but I understood that there was another, deeper

reality beyond my normal experience. I just didn’t know how to access it.

Over the next three years I searched, reading many books: Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and others. I took LSD and kept searching for a way to connect with this miraculous force that I had experienced.

Then I decided to take sculpture again.

This class was different from the last one. I was given total freedom, but my initial experience didn't repeat itself. I made several abstract clay sculptures, and everyone thought that they were fantastic, but I hated everything that I did. Every piece seemed somehow flawed, distorted. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t make a piece of sculpture that satisfied me. I gradually began to understand that the problem was in me. The forms

that I was creating came from a very deep part of myself and my outer being was a distortion of what I was deep inside; I was my own distorting filter, a flawed tool. Sculpture was totally frustrating and I decided to give it up and search for a way to correct my situation.

I felt that the solution to my problem would not come from the outside like psychology, because you can’t fix what is broken with what is broken, so I began to search. I jumped into taking workshops, practicing Transcendental Meditation and Yoga every day. I was seeing slow progress, but I was a young man in a hurry. I had three friends who drove an hour and a half each way to Detroit every Sunday for this thing called Subud. However, they couldn’t give me any coherent explanation of what it was – it just sounded crazy. One day they told me that Susan, whom I was interested in, was going

to ride along to check it out and I said I would go. When the next Sunday came around, Susan was nowhere to be found and I was stuck going.

We arrived at a plain house in the inner city of Detroit and a stocky polish man greeted me saying: “Sit down in this chair, we’re going upstairs, we’ll be back in half an hour”.

I settled down in the soft chair and closed my eyes and then all hell broke loose

overhead. I heard people stomping and walking around and voices in a kind of free form abstract singing that was so random that it couldn’t have been rehearsed. When I opened my eyes all the colors in the room had shifted to their own opposite, so I closed them. I felt a wave of energy so strong that all I could do was to sit back and let it wash over me. I recognized this energy from the first time that I had felt it, on the last day of my first sculpture class.

After three months of sitting in the chair and letting the energy wash over me, I was brought upstairs to join the others. It was like sitting in the chair except that I stood and moved not of my own accord. Soon my life began to change. I felt like I was being turned inside out. A very powerful transformation was occurring within me, and I felt that I had to find some way to relax. I remembered that working with clay was very relaxing, so I bought a bag of clay and carving tools. I spent a couple of hours each day carving and shaping clay. It was incredibly satisfying and after a week I had a clay sculpture that was totally perfect to me. I realized that being opened had created a clear

path from my inner to my outer self, enabling this to happen.

I showed the clay sculpture to an artist friend who advised me to have it cast in bronze at a local sculpture foundry. I sanded smooth the cast bronze sculpture and polished it to a mirror finish. I showed it to a Subud friend traveling through town and he asked if he could take it with him to Chicago and show it to some people. I said for sure. He called me a week later to tell me that I was now in the best gallery in Chicago – The Gilman Gallery. That first sculpture ended up in a museum show. That’s how I got into Subud and became an Artist.

My first bronze sculpture

My first bronze sculpture