A painting I’ve been sitting with this week, slowly adding lines here and there, initially “inspired” by walking the puppy for however many days in a row we’ve been in-place (is it 50?) around the same streets in my neighborhood and trying to find some new ways, new turns, to create unexpected experience, while being hemmed in by circumstance.
Over the week, as I’ve painted and repainted lines, this has become also a meditation on the energies coursing through all of us in any given day. That sounds trite as I write it. But all week, I’ve been burning with a fire, somewhere under my lungs but above the gut, that has been driving me to compulsion. For example, I was up at 5am this morning, ready to go with all the things (images, conversations, relationships within relationships, threading and overlapping and interweaving, prayers for the suffering, and an overwhelming flood of gratitude and wonder for these moments and for this moment), but before I got the work I just sat in silence for awhile and let it be, quietly paying attention to that fire, asking it what it wants, inviting it to be in relationship with me, in companionship, until the fire and I are one. This painting begins to reveal itself as an image of this fire, both within my corporeal body and infinitely drawn in every direction. I am unraveling and that is a good thing – I must unravel to be knitted into you. It is an un-self-portrait, a one-portrait, one-with-all, transmitting and receiving, burning from a fuel I can only name as Love.
Also, the colors make me think of 80s graphics which is awesome.
