When the snow begins to fall, it is like looking out at a blank canvas. There is no color, no flowers, just the white spread of nothing…waiting for inspiration.
And underneath, Mother Nature works her wonder.
Until then, we watch, we wait and we think about what creations she will allow us to make when next we meet.
And what better to do on a snow filled day when there is no color available to paint with? Bake cookies of course… 🙂
When your living. Such inspiration is all around.
When I began this site and really the exploration of myself as an artist, a painter anyway, I did so because I was inspired by my partner. She had a way of saying go for it that gave me a freedom to explore I would not otherwise give myself. For that I thank her.
A number of the posts I have done here to date were written in a sense to her specifically, or at least I included something about her, I wanted her to be a part of what I was doing, what she had helped inspire in me and I hoped she would read the posts and feel the love I was giving. I don’t know that she ever read any of them, at least she never said she did and she was not one to not show her appreciation for kind words and feeling included.
That relationship has ended. I am sad for the passing of the relationship. It ebbs and flows. It is still a new change and my time alone has just begun and in the solace there is sadness and there is loneliness and that is okay. I need to feel these things.
Three years ago my grandmother passed away. She was probably the person, aside from my children that I have the most love for on this planet. The day of her funeral was the saddest day of my life. I cried and felt such despair I didn’t even know was possible. I hated feeling that way. I chose not to feel anymore and for the last couple of years I have only felt superficially, but these last few weeks, those walls came crashing down.
I have felt great love and great sadness in the last few weeks and as much as the sadness hurts, I have enjoyed every minute of feeling again. Every minute.
When a relationship ends you go through a lot of different things, right now it is in the ugly throws of death, lashing out, hurting, gasping and clawing at the skin. I am sad and most importantly, despite that sadness I have to stay true to myself and the path before me.
I painted this on some paper earlier to hang in the house as a reminder, to not engage, to not let the claws sink in and pull me in to a place I don’t want or need to be, to break the cycle. I let go, but sometimes, we still need a reminder in the late hours when our mind is not as resilient as our heart needs it to be…
I don’t know how much painting I will do this summer, especially Scrye Dye, some I imagine. There might be a goodbye piece in me somewhere. We’ll see what comes about.
Lisa told me I am suffering from Klepto Flora…now she’s not a Psychiatrist, but she does play one sometimes when we do Improv and she does a great accent, so I tend to take her psychiatric advice quite seriously.
Evidently she views the way I have been eyeing gardens around town and plotting the movements of their owners for the best time to stroll by and sample their wares as a clinically diagnosable condition.
I stand by my earlier assertion, I don’t have a problem, I have a passion.
That being said…if there is someone who has a garden full of fabulous colors and they would like to invite me over to paint in it, please leave me a comment and we can talk. Anything that keeps my name off the police blotter sounds like a good idea.
It may go by another name, or perhaps many, but I couldn’t find anything that really fit it, so in trying to identify a categorization system I also found a name. More on that another time. For now, I want to take a moment to describe exactly what it is.
By Dictionary.com’s definition, to Scrye(or as they spell it, Scry), “Foretell the future using a crystal ball or other reflective object or surface.”
In a way, I would like to think this is much the same, but instead what we are doing is dipping our heads deep through the surface of the flow and experiencing creativity, divinity and just a bit of peace.
For me, to Scrye is to paint with flowers.
Now looking that up on-line leads to many results, but none that I could find that were anything like what I was doing. They all involved placing dried leaves into a painting or using leaves and branches to make a pattern or as a brush.
No, what I meant was actually painting with flowers.
I started by raiding Lisa’s garden, with her permission of course, egads if I hadn’t, though she does keep a close eye on me, lol…you’ll understand why soon enough.
I plucked a petal from something, I don’t recall what it was, and started smearing it on an old hard piece of canvas I had bought at a yard sale this summer. I believe it left a purple smear. While having played with oil paints this summer I had discovered at least, that medium, blended in most interesting ways. Why not the colors from a flowers petals, leaves and other parts?
Before you know it, I was begging Lisa to bring me flowers from all around, smearing them, making mental notes and then moving on. I soon did what I always do and started too make sense of the chaos before me, even though it is the chaos that I most wanted to paint.
Once caught up in the moment, I joined the flow and explored. The first results are somewhere nearby, maybe even posted below, nothing exciting, somewhat mediocre really, but I could see there was potential.
From there I did a couple of somewhat random paintings with the flowers I had liked best from my first experiments and although it was pale, the results, swirls of color, were enchanting.
Next I started a couple of different attempts at making a palette book, I am using a paper one now, but really need to get a book of canvas pages to do it right. Every petal behaves differently depending on the substrate it is applied to. It was during the palette book stage that I needed a system of classification and thereby stumbled across the name I would come to call it.