Tag Archives: artjournaling

Love is the Permeable veil

This painting could easily be called Grief and Enlightenment. Or Grief and the Opening Heart. This is the second painting in this series as I paint my grief for my mother’s passing. I ponder the nature of death. I wonder, where is she? Busy, engaged, happy? I think so. I do believe in life after death. George Emery always said, “There ain’t no such thing as dead life.”

What has surprised me the most is the mystical nature of these first few weeks of her passing. I have read a lot about grief and loss. I thought I might understand it to some extent. But no, at least not in my own unique experience. One night I woke from a sound sleep and my dark bedroom was pulsating with soft light in small orbs. Quiet, tone on tone color, moving very gently. I thought, how in the world would I ever paint this? It was a visual experience without insights or emotion.

What I sense is an opening of my heart. I can feel the old emotional barriers coming down. I cannot explain this. I am experiencing transformation. Perhaps as my mother was able to drop the severe limitations of her ending of her last months of life, I too am freed up of those limitations.

It is my sensing that it takes nine months for a human to come into form, and it takes nine months for the energetic body to dissipate after a person passes. I suspect their energetic field is what we carry in close memory for that person.

So back to the painting, bright pink or magenta is my mom’s favorite color. I painted the sheerest of veils. When we communicate with those who have crossed to the other side, what connects the two sides is love. Love IS the permeable veil.

Lake and Mountain

This is an overview of my current art journal page. It’s a landscape-oriented big watercolor Moleskine book.

This is the right hand page of Lake and Mountains

This is the left hand side of Lake and Mountains.

Lake and Mountains

I just finished reading the 1980 Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe by Laurie Lisle, which I highly recommend for anyone just wanting to wrap their head around the life and legend of this phenomenal artist.

I just returned from a pilgrimage to her two houses in New Mexico, one at Ghost Ranch where we stayed a few days to explore and photograph “O’Keeffe Country.” Then we visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It was there that I bought the book as well as many prints, cards, and additional art books focusing on this artist.

My trip was so visually rich that I have been floundering, trying to figure out how to integrate all the visual and intellectual information I’ve taken in. One thing I did was buy a big landscape view watercolor Moleskine sketchbook and began art journaling.

I title all my journals, and this one is called “Working Into My Own,” with an O’Keeffe quote that is meaningful to me at this stage of my life:

“I was alone and singularly free, working into my own–no one to satisfy but myself.” —Georgia O’Keeffe Some Memories of Drawings

Now that I’ve finished the biography, I am looking deeply at her paintings. For this art journal page, I was studying the composition of her “Lake and Mountains” because I was fascinated by the egg shape. It took me a long time to figure out it was supposed to be a lake:

By trying to copy O’Keeffe’s composition and color scheme in “Lake and Mountains,” I was trying to learn from her about soft rounded shapes pushed up against sharper, jagged shapes.

 

O’Keeffe is the Queen of Simplicity, of smooth, pared-down abstractions and a flawless surface application of paint, all of which I admire but do not personally aspire to.

I added mysterious dark shapes into my landscape using torn tissue paper. I love the spontaneous, unexpected effects of torn paper and the full range of playful collage tools and techniques that typify the art journal aesthetic.

Have you been doing any art lately? Discovered ay new artists or fun techniques?