nancy wrote that they added a drop of food coloring to the bubble mix for sweet lily. it must have been enchanting…colorful bubbles in way-below-freezing temperatures, crystalizing, transformed by the absolute cold. i know there are bubbles in this house; i just have to find them. and then, next time, i will be out on our back deck, wand in hand.
there really is something about bubbles. in the summer, at the farmer’s market they sell gigantic bubble wands. while browsing one day, there was this little girl….chasing these enormous bubbles. no worries on her mind, just arms outstretched, running, ready to embrace oversized magic. it instantly reminded us of the innocence of a child, the seizing of something simple, the joyous caress of a moment.
this morsel and this not-quite-done-painting CHASING BUBBLES make me want to run into the sunshine or, perhaps, the falling snow, and chase iridescent dreams.
i have a unique front row seat to paintings in process. running downstairs to throw in another load of laundry or seek out a tool i need, i will glance at the easel in the studio to peek at what’s up next…this time, the sketch of two people dancing made me stop. it immediately made me thinking of when we have danced in the front yard or the kitchen or out on the deck or on a mountain trail. i got lost in the tango and wandered back upstairs, no new laundry spinning in the washer or tool in my hand.
the next time i looked at the easel i found these two people emerging and color exploding off the canvas. i have learned, in this time of living with a brush-in-hand-artist, that this is the under-painting, a place that involves steps at which i often want to tell him to stop!wait!it’s perfect! sometimes he does – stop. other times he keeps going, for the vision in his mind’s eye is beyond what is on the easel and there is more to develop.
it’s a unique place in the front row. maybe more comparable to back-stage or the green room or the recording studio before “record”…a place of preparation, a place of reflection, a place of swirling beauty, a place of possibility, a place where the-painting-someone-dreams-of-hanging-on-their-wall is being born.
my husband is a painter. of course, you know that. his studio is steps away from mine, steps away from our office, steps away from the coffee pot. what that means is that i can just pop in at any time to see what he’s painting, to chat, to have a cuppa or bring down a couple glasses of wine, to throw myself in front of paintings he is about to cover over with a swath of new paint.
what’s really fascinating is the process of his painting. i will walk down and find pieces on the wall or the easel that speak to me and he will tell me that he is “no where neeeeear done.” he takes pictures along the way and i scam them onto my camera roll for future use, not willing to let go of the resonance of one of the along-the-way iterations of a painting.
this week is a perfect example of that. he was in the middle of a painting – a follow-up to earth interrupted I – when i went downstairs to chat (read: procrastinate doing whatever it was i was supposed to be doing at the time.) the image and color screamed out at me. i couldn’t beLIEVE he was going to cover it all up with more paint. the process was so striking. take a moment to just really look at these process shots and the morsel i chose and breathe them in:
process morsel
process morsel
morsel of a process morsel – held in process
and yet, the finished painting earth interrupted II is a stunning, stunning, stunning canvas. it belongs somewhere to get its due. it makes me feel like the universe is weeping for the earth. it makes you pay attention to it. i am humbled by how truly magnificent this painting is.
earth interrupted II, mixed media 48″ x 34.5″
each week i design products from each of the days in our melange. some of these are cartoons, some just words, some lyrics or song titles and some are david’s paintings. i have the creative latitude to choose morsels of his paintings and design from there…a enviable starting point for someone who loves flexibility. this week is a sort of brain stretch. with the exception of designing leggings, where i used both of the morsels on this page, the morsel i have used in design is a morsel of a morsel process shot of earth interrupted II (i said it was a brain stretch.) it is called held in process and is a beautiful (and absolutely timely) image on its own. how odd that it is not actually the painting, but is underneath the painting, a layer of earth interrupted II.
it makes me wonder if we ever think about how layered everything is, everyone is. what is beneath the surface…a richness we may never know, a history we can’t necessarily comprehend. where we have all come from is woven color and texture and light and darkness, swaths of paint and attempted erasures that would cause other people to stand in front and call out to us, “no! don’t erase that! it’s beautiful! it’s important! it speaks to me.” we are all held in process.
reverse threading 