The Guardians

Are you ready for this??? ……. I’m actually completely happy with another painting! Woo Hoo!!!

It’s always nice when critiquing time comes around and you don’t even have to hear yourself complain!

OK. So this is how it started out.  I used 300 lb cold press paper. I believe it’s 24×30″.  I used acrylic paint and charcoal.

I am in love with using the charcoal.  I was roaming around YouTube one day and found an artist named Gerda Lipski .  She was combining acrylic and charcoal on watercolor paper and I was instantly mesmerized.

For me, there is something about using this thick heavy paper that creates translucency that traditional canvases just can’t match.  In the next few days I will show you canvases done at the same time as this painting and ETHEREAL and you will be able to tell.  The canvases are much darker and busier.

Now, let’s talk about the initial layer of this painting .  It looks like a horrible 80’s-throw-back painting doesn’t it?  I love this intuitive painting style because you just pick a point and start, but as the artist you keep going and going until you intuitively know you are finished.  So with this initial layer I gave myself quite a few shapes in charcoal that I could flip the paint around multiple times and see where it took me, but with this painting, I knew instantly.  Even though they are round, I knew them to be eggs.

The birds were created using stencils I created for bird paintings a year ago.  They were made from cardboard from my recycling bin and on many occasions I almost tossed them back into the recycling, but for some reason I allowed them to kick around in my basement and instantly when I saw those eggs in my mind, I also saw those bird stencils.

Birds? Eggs? From there came building the nest.  There are many layers of acrylic and charcoal swirling around this painting.  It was fun.  I envisioned the robins in my yard picking up twigs one at a time adding and building.  I took my inspiration from them and added and edited until I knew the nest to be complete.

As I looked at the painting, the last thing I felt it needed was a glow.  That made it mystical to me.  When I look at the painting complete, I see the two birds as guardians of something quite magical.

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So taking it to another level check out this book that found me.  I say this book found me because I went to Block Island, entered their library, climbed up the stairs to a room in the library less perused by many, randomly turned into the third row and right at my eye-level was this book:

I’m into anything spiritual and mystical, so of course I grabbed it and read it on the beach last week.  Very cool book about Ancient Mexican Shamans by the way, but the thing that stuck with me, is that the shaman in this book interprets human’s energy mass as circular orbs of light.  Shamans believe every darn thing in the universe to be some form of energy.  There are trees, rocks, birds, thunderstorms, mental thoughts, global thoughts, wind, universe…the great creator…everything is energy and has a shape. To them some energy looks like filaments, clouds, fluid and some energy looks like orbs.

What I found interesting, is this shaman’s lineage goes back like a thousand years.  Each shaman passes the information learned to the next generation and this is the part I found interesting.  What this particular family of shamans interpreted was that humans auras were egg-shaped a thousand years ago.  When the shamans saw humans energy masses then, they were in the shape of an egg.  Today, in the twentieth century, they interpret the energy as orbs – circular.  Something happened over the centuries that our energy masses shifted in shape.  I believe it had something to do with the hardening of our thought processes and the interpretation of all matter as concrete and finite.  This has changed our auras shape.

hmmm…

Have I scared you off with all of this mumbo-jumbo?

When I got home and looked at this painting again I thought to myself, yes, exactly!  This was what I felt when I was painting!  I instantly saw those round blue circles in my painting as orbs/eggs even though they weren’t “egg-shaped”. I knew them to need this special glow of light, like energy.

The birds in my painting are the guardians. Guardians of something mystical. Guardians of us humans.  Anyone who knows me intimately knows I have had a really strong connection to birds in the past 3 years.  Strange stories I could tell you…

So why am I dribbling on?  I read this book which totally put what I knew about my painting into words.  The crazy thing is the synchronicity.  I finished the painting two weeks before I got on a ferry, went to Block Island, randomly climbed the stairs, went into the third aisle and found this book waiting for me.

The painting and the book were connected but separated by time.

If that aint an amazing koinky-dink, then I don’t know what is…

WEIRD right?  … do-do-do-do!