Studio, 042425
This week I started painting again. I’d put it aside for a few months, because the energy for it wasn’t there. But something has returned, so I started. I didn’t overthink it or plan it – I just began sketching in acrylic on a wood panel I had lying around, as it’s quicker and easier to work with. I am of course referencing visual language I know – mapping and crumpled paper and in-between spaces. This let me begin, and I had some notion of where the image could go. But it didn’t go there – whether due to lack of ability or patience to make it look how I had intended (a referent in my mind). Or, the image just had a life of its own. I asked Heather what she saw, and she said it “kinda looks like a heart” which surprised me how cringey my response to that was – aka that is NOT what I want! Generally I don’t like representations of hearts – in valentines or like when athletes form hearts with their hands. Just feels trite to me somehow, sorry because I know people dig it. Anyway, rather than running from this reaction I had, I chose to be curious about it. If the image had some “heart” energy in it, then I would just follow that. And my friends this is new, surprising, and refreshing for me. Normally I’d macho-muscle the image, covering all reference to heart and turn it into a mountain or something, submitting the image to my own original ‘idea’ or ideal. Instead I allowed it’s ‘heartness’ to guide me, and to gently follow and flow with its current – the energy of the image itself, emerging not by my authorship but by something else.
What emerged is this image – not a heart shape, but something energetic and coursing. If I may be so bold I might call it an ‘interior landscape’ of a larger heart of Love that is within me, and all things, including you! This is the energy of the image, for me. Whether it appears that way to you, or whether I am in well-trodden artistic terrain (pun intended), well, I just don’t give a shit. A better way to say it is, I hear that Inner Critic voice telling me these things, and instead of telling myself it sucks, I am trying to gently allow that voice to speak, tell it I have heard, set it aside, and allow another voice to speak. I am telling myself, “love supports this”. This is a stranger, larger, more life-giving voice. And I need to learn to be better at allowing that voice to speak, and learn to gently set aside the louder critic voice. This image is my interior journey of this process, worked out onto a throwaway wooden panel in the evening twilights and dawns of this past week, now here shared with you.
It’s a way forward for me. Something in me continues to doubt a way forward is possible, but that doubt is quieting. I am trying to trust the small voice that says “love supports this” can become a louder voice, and indeed it is! I am strengthening it like a muscle. I do this by asking in each moment (wisdom given to me years ago but not practiced well), “is this Love?” “Is THIS Love?” And then, take a step towards what might be Love.
So, in all things, never despair. Whatever small spark of love might be available to you in the ordinary rhythm of your life, I implore you by all that is good to kindle that spark. Delicately cup your hands around that spark and shield it from the winds, as you gently breathe your spirit into it. Find what connects you to love, and allow yourself to feel it in your bones. For all our sakes and the sake of the world, do this.
I put the word ‘disappear” in the image at the bottom. As I am listening to songs in the studio that invite me to love. The song is Disappear by INXS, sung by mystic Michael Hutchence. “You’re so fine! Lose my mind! And the whole world seems to disappear…All our problems, all our fears, and the whole world seems to disappear”.
#alineamongstotherlines