Lost In Your Embrace

Coming back to a painting in progress is like coming home...I breathe a huge sigh of relief - I have found my way back to where I belong.

Art Essentials:

- Self imposed solitude surrounded by nature
- Cadmium red dark
- Light ultramarine blue
- Light green (yellow shade)
- Giant Asian watercolor brushes
- Giant bamboo reed pen
- Sennelier soft pastels: pale cloud blue
- Glitter/mica
- Caran d'Ache neopastels: bleu turquoise
- My project manager, Jamie Lees D'Angelo
- All my loves, and you know who you are

My mission: to let passion flow, captured forever - forever free.

"I have never been touched like this by another"
From the song "Touched" by Delerium

In process - acrylic & pastel on masonite - 48" x 48"

"What I would do to be lost in your embrace"
From the song "Fallen" by Delerium

I believe I've found happiness surrounded by colors: sticks, tubes, jars, bottles, sprinkles, brushes.

Musical Ambiance: Chimera by Delerium

Soul Speak

In process - acrylic & pastel on masonite - 48" x 48"

A new surface today - the rough side of my masonite panel, primed and ready with three coats of house primer.

I've been writing and researching alot for the online course I'll be teaching - trying to determine the outcomes of the course. Perhaps my lunar based course is trying to teach me something; to let go of outcomes. Aren't there enough courses out there that beat that into our heads?

How about a course that seeks to awaken us to our passion, our instincts, our inner knowing, our emotions? I know how easy it is to cut oneself off from these ways of being. Society and the media cannot package and sell these qualities - we must spark and grow them on our own or in cahoots with like-minded souls who now, thanks to the internet are much easier to find.

Today I look at my pure white canvas board and I realize how important it is to be true to myself and to express this truth in all I do. Why, you may ask...Because happiness breeds happiness, passion - passion and joy - joy ... I revel in this fertility.

By picking up a pen, a brush (whatever works for you!) we focus our attention, our minds, upon the other, as we let our soul speak. It's truly amazing how we are able to manipulate our own feelings, change track, or get back on track, fall off track - do we even realize how powerful we are?

I can play our song, create you on canvas and then wash it all away....

"Can't fight the fighter, I keep losing ground
and I can't hide the hider with you hanging around."
From the song "Run For It" by Delerium

As I press myself into it's surface (the masonite) I leave an imprint from my soul to yours.

"Do you believe in dreams?
That's how I found you."
From the song "Fallen" by Delerium

Musical Ambiance: Chimera by Delerium

Penelope's Song

Learning to live with duality, maybe one day I'll find triplicity.

"I'll keep your heart with mine
Till you come to me..."
From "Penelope's Song" by Loreena McKennitt

The moon cycles us through an understanding of relationship - with the sun, our source, our spirit mission.

The moon's glow a mere reflection - in blue of night we 'see', we intuit, we reason, about that which is too bright to view by day and the naked eye.

In process - acrylic & pastel on masonite - 48" x 48"

"The moonlight it was dancing
On the waves, out on the sea."
From "Beneath a Phrygian Sky" by Loreena McKennitt

Musical Ambiance: The Ancient Muse by Loreena McKennitt

Everything is Love

Letting tension, anger, drain away so I can get to that place of calm and focus - that place where painting germinates.

To be able to work - first space and time needs to be carved out.

We are called to do our work, be it cleaning, or painting, or fathering or dancing.

For me, the paint, the music, call me home every time.

In Process - acrylic & pastel on masonite - 48" x 48"

I sit and watch the paint drip, and miss my home.

Each mark, a telling, a revealing, of my soul.

Abby-Girl

I'm know I'm asking a lot of you dear reader, but take a leap - join with me, though I know not where we'll land.

Everything is love, including the darkness.

Musical Ambiance: Loreena McKennitt

Mating in Captivity

Desert Soul- acrylic & pastel on masonite - 48" x 48"

Leo full moon last night. The most important thing is heart - I can feel mine beating.

I'm reading a book by Esther Perel called "Mating in Captivity" - here are some interesting bits:

" One aspect of the erotic blueprint that illustrates the irrationality of our desire is that what excites us most often arises from our childhood hurts and frustrations".

"The central agent of eroticism is the human imagination, but for many people the project of sexual self-discovery is hampered by parental messages that induce fear, guilt, and mistrust".

"The body is the purest, most primal tool we have for communicating. As Roland Barthes wrote, "What language conceals is said through my body.""

"Erotic intimacy is an act of generosity and self-centeredness, of giving and taking.".

"The first place we learn about love and relationships is in our original family".

"Love and desire are not the same. Cozy is not the same as sexy".

"Intimacy does nurture desire, but sexual pleasure also demands separateness. Erotic excitement requires that we be able to step out of the intimate bond for a moment, turn toward ourselves, and focus on our own mounting sensations. We need to be able to be momentarily selfish in order to be erotically connected."

Desert Soul

So much to do, sometimes a list can be overwhelming!

Art-making quiets and focuses the mind onto the present until all else drifts away - kinda like meditation, a simplification, like water for a parched desert soul.

I stare at my canvas, this time it's made of tempered masonite. I've primed it three times with house primer on the smooth side and once on the rough side, to prevent warping.

It is a large square 48" x 48" and it's presence is firm and solid compared to the wispy, delicate yet surprisingly strong surface of silk that I've been painting on for the last three months. My husband bought one large sheet of masonite 8' long and cut it in two for me.

The day is grey, the rain is coming and my feet are cold - there is something wrong with the heater.

I've been reading Artillery Magazine - the Sex Issue and in particular one article, "Art With Benefits" by Josh Herman and am thinking about this quote from Jilda "To me, art must evoke something within us - be it joy, sadness, reverence or lust. An object which fails to do that is merely pretty." And although my work is abstract I feel it is also emotionally charged and sexually symbolic. I'm not painting sex per se, nothing so literal. But instead passion, emotion - intimate emotion.

In process - acrylic & pastel on masonite - 48" x 48"

This is a journey into my own expression of intimacy - a poetically abstract journey, minus the depiction of flesh - save that for the pornographers.

This masonite surface is so slick, hard, shiny, like new ice - not sure how to navigate this world yet.

The following day:
Suddenly
I
feel
happy.

I think I like this masonite surface.

Abby-girl

"It's a long, long, lonely ride
to find the perfect lover
for your lover."

From the song "The Taxi Ride" by Jane Siberry

Musical Ambiance: The Speckless Sky ~ Jane Siberry

Cracks in Everything

I sit and stare at my sheet of plexiglass, edges smoothed and beveled by using a Dremel. Its hard, clear, plastic surface is cold and scratchey, like ice, like looking through a frozen lake at hidden worlds. How I miss the ice-world, but now the sun and dry desert call out to me - a counterbalance.

Cold and hard - warm and dry, the surface impermeable when dry, cracking with heat. Extremes always, that's how I know I'm on track!

Plexiglass Drypoint Etching - In Process

I choose to hold and touch this surface, make my mark, a force of nature, yet not quite a mark of impermanence, it is plastic after all - man-made, not biodegradable..."the future is plastics" (remember that line from the movie The Graduate?) and look what's become of us - drowning in plastic.

These paintings are not playthings. They are cracks, openings into another world.

"There is a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in" (Leonard Cohen lyrics).

Cracks like wrinkles, proving nothing, just the passing of time.