The act of painting has taken hold and I am in the daily bliss of colour and light again. I sometimes do not understand the incubation periods that preceed this ‘pouring out’ of paint…how I feel ignited somehow when the time is right? I become prolific and know that if I could sustain this and NOT stop, then I would slowly disappear from the things that ‘everybody does’ and remain in joy at the easel. For now I will just thrill in the experience as it is so good for my soul. What a punctuation mark to the summer!
What has changed in the art? To some degree I think that I have turned back the clock and with more than fifteen years of experience, have returned to the marks that I made when setting out painting landscape….with one difference, the experience informs the work and the compositions are stronger and the colour is so incredibly ‘easy’. At times, as a challenge or as an insecurity, I have painted quite literally. These paintings always impress people somehow. "Wow! That looks so real!" However, as one becomes confident in one’s true artist-soul, there is a release and the process of ‘making art’ becomes only a conversation between the artist and the art. It is an absolute joy!
I think that the process of painting the Chapel wall contributed to a higher sense of what ‘art’ is and now I feel as though the art is sacred. I feel as though I honour it and that it comes from a deeper place. Soon I will paint the figurative pieces that have been incubating in my mind and heart for so long. I will also take on a series in acrylic…something definitely derived from the Chapel-experience.
It seems ‘crazy’ that I have relied on a single subject for the most part….all of these years. Of course, I have painted so many places…in so many ways…rivers, mountains…urban as well as rural landscape. But at the base of the exploration, there has remained a single hill. At this point I know this hill so personally that it has become an icon for me. It becomes more and more a mass and its details disappear to leave structure and soundness. The blue sky remains an energetic wall, somehow separate…like a witness. The blue is what remains of my paternal grandfather…it is what remains.