I’m Going To Get Personal About All This Painting Big Stuff

This is the painting I told you about HERE.  The one I started on the Lunar Eclipse.

It’s still a work in process in my studio, but I thought I’d share some of it with you anyways!  There’s just something quite enchanting about watching a painting unfold.  Don’t you think?

It reminds me of being a parent.   I want to capture all the nuances and subtle things about Phoenix that maybe I’ll forget later on when he’s more mature.I personally love it and that’s why I take a gazillion pictures when I’m painting.  Ok, well maybe not that many, but I take a lot of pictures of my paintings as they move along.

Anyways, thank God, Goddess, the Universe and my beloved Ma Durga for painting BIG.

It has been way too long since vellum bristol has kissed my studio wall.  Yes, I paint almost every single day of my life — in an art journal, a sketch book, and I even been working on canvas lately too.

But something about taping those papers together and standing vulnerable before a blank portal as long as my own arms reach.

It excites and terrifies me.

It humbles me and gives me the most pungent of pride.

It gets my engines going and activates the sacred in my life like incense in a temple.

Work In Process {3}

And I couldn’t ask for a better homecoming.

This painting has literally torn me to pieces and then slyly, like a blind snake in a meadow, sewn me back up when I wasn’t looking.

For too long  there’s been this civil war going on inside me over some of my own creativity — my own voice in the world.

On my lowest days I’ve been beating myself up and then hanging my shoes from a telephone wire like a real bully.

But finally I had enough.  I needed to pull the tit away from all these heavy feelings I’ve been nursing and cut the microphone on all the ridiculous things I’ve been telling myself.

I needed to kneel in front of my own altar, the large vellum bristol, and beg for redemption.

The funny thing about FEARLESS® Painting is that most of the time the oracles and guidance I seek never come when I’m painting.

It’s like the painting process itself is the clearing of the pipes, so later, when I’m standing in the grocery check-out line, or pumping gas at 11pm, or putting a band-aid on my toe that I mindlessly rammed into the stairs, then…then it arrives.

It just pours into me effortlessly like light in a Caravaggio painting.

And that’s what this lady in my FEARLESS® Painting has been doing for me.  She’s been sending out eviction notices to these demons who’ve been squatting rent free in my mind.

I don’t think  the healing occurs from analyzing why those buggers were there in the first place or who rolled out the welcome mat in their honor.

Healing occurs from grace — something we can’t control, plan for, or schedule in.

So when healing occurs I find its just best to bow my head and be grateful that I did enough work clearing out the pipes for it to flow easily.

We all get it — life is rough.  Life is hard.  There’s a million demons out there waiting for a vacancy light to go on in our hearts or minds so that they can move their shit in and start picking out curtains.

Lots of people I know invest in stronger boundaries: iron fences, barbed wire, deadbolts, and armies.

For me, I just tape a couple papers together, pick up a paintbrush, and leave it up to timing.