The Channel, Waiting on a Dream

(The Channel - top, Waiting on a Dream - bottom)

I am going to post two at a time today - so as I was saying last time, I had a bit of a pause on the painting and was backed up.  Once it got released there was an explosion of many paintings and I got obsessed there for a while.  I couldn't stop painting!  I appreciated that happening because during the dry period it felt like it will never happen and then when it did I felt compelled to ride that wave.  I am reading a book right now (don't have the title on hand) about how in order to really allow creativity to flourish, people have to be ok with failure and keep going.  I think that might be the biggest challenge that I am hearing from artists and people who have a dream of expressing themselves creatively but are afraid to try. 

So I just plunged right in, disliked a few paintings, heard the critic in my mind and told it to f**k off!  And then I got into what I felt was this amazing ride where I started to forget myself and didn't realize that I was about to pee in my pants because I forgot that I had a bladder that needed emptying every so often.  And that's how I rekindled my passion with the canvas and realized that I cannot live without this ritual of expressing myself visually. 

I feel called to teach workshops and show people techniques to bring out their hidden creativity.  One day...

Back to the canvas

Across the Bridge

I have taken some time off from painting and working - a few months or so during the summer. After my first year doing outdoor shows, I got so burnt! The second year will be easier since the guessing is taken out of the equation and we will know what we're doing. We = my husband and I. He has been kind and supportive in helping me with the shows - poor guy, it's not easy.


The Landscape
After some time off, I had a crazy urge to paint. When I painted I just let the process lead me and I didn't feel like painting anything specific. So I let the paint, paint itself...

I began splattering a ton of colors that called to me and sprayed them with water swishing them, moving the canvas and allowing them to flow where they want to flow. I thought it was so cool that without doing much, so much comes out! I was also reading the Tao Te Ching this summer - little bits of it. What I got from it is that life doesn't so much need our help but comes out perfect when we let things be. I thought of that as I allowed the paints to move and become something almost all on their own. Ofcourse I would dab and choose the colors being a co-creator but most of it was how they moved when the canvas would tilt. I love crystals and some looked like crystals and natural formations that you see in nature.

One of them in particular looked like angels to me - I called that one city of angels because so many of the images that developed came out to look like angels.

City of Angels