April 26, 2016 – Why paint?

Listen to this post:

I’ve just started a new big painting. When my coaching sister Susan, gave Happy a home up in the wild grasslands of Canada last year, we decided it was easier to ship it unframed. So, for almost a year, there’s been a beautiful frame for a 40” square painting, sitting up in my hubby’s workshop. It’s been begging for a new painting, so that it can be out of potential harm’s way – and up on a wall somewhere. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what that might be. Not every image calls to be made into a painting this big.

What has come up, is another with blossoms and blue sky – following in Happy’s vein. The trip to Filoli with Sue and Lenore, gave me the images to draw from. This one is a combination of two branches, one of which had a bee on it. But it needed more. So I’m doing something I’ve not really done before – I’m “faking it”, by bringing in two other bees from other images I took. Yes, it would have been amazing if I had been able to capture this whole thing, just like this – the two branches and the three bees. But I didn’t. And I want the painting to really come alive, like I was, when I was there with Sue on that perfect spring day, obsessing about getting the perfect apple blossom pictures to paint from.

When I’m looking through a bunch of images I’ve taken, most of them don’t “work.” I look for a certain something in a composition – the light, the arrangement of the flowers or fruit – whatever the subject is – it has to meet me. There is an instrument in the center of my chest that feels it. It is a “yes” – a spark of energy, that expands when I see the one to paint. Sometimes it’s elusive – I want to paint it, but am not sure. So, then I project it amongst several other images at the size I might paint them. I could get the internal go-ahead at this point. But if there’s something in me that is trying to force it, I compare it in my mind to what I’ve already painted. If it doesn’t hold its own amongst the rest of my work, I keep looking.

Those of you who’ve painted with me know, that I paint the furthest away to the closest up. This means I’d paint the sky and the out of focus background first, then the branches and leaves, before painting the in-focus blossoms. I save the focal point for last – in this one, it’s the bees. I do this for two reasons – one is to keep my motivation going. I paint the part I’m least interested in or I find the hardest first, saving my favorite part for last. The other is, if, when painting the background, I, paint over the main focus by accident, it’s much easier to clean it up before I’ve painted – say, the subtle shading of a white petal. I’d have to fix what I’d already painted.

The actual painting process of this one, is off to a bit of a bumpy start. The blue sky looks blotchy to me – but I’m living with it and am moving on. I’m now into the hardest part – the fuzzy background. There is a lot of it in this one. As much as I’ve been enjoying the actual painting, it’s taking a very long time! Just that little section – roughly 6”x7” or so – has taken me 4 painting sessions (between 1-2 hours each) to paint. I think I’m going to need to shift my process and paint some of the blossom petals – with their larger expanses – or I’ll make myself crazy, painting fuzzy circles for days and days. I was hoping to get this finished by mid-June, to enter in the Marin County Fair. We shall see!

While I’ve been painting, I’m continuing to accompany myself, with more Krista Tippett. Over the weekend, I heard “Einstein’s God.” Albert Einstein was an incredible man. Beyond his forwarding and expanding our understanding of the nature of the universe, he had a wise and compassionate heart. I learned he loved music, and took his violin wherever he went. He said something about the place of art in our spiritual lives,that had me go back and re-listen last night, so I could transcribe it for you. He said that his God was not a personal God, but a cosmic God, that gives him a feeling of “nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence strikes [us] as a sort of prison and [we want] to experience the universe as a single, significant whole… In my view it is the most important function of art and science, to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.” [emphasis mine]

I’m a meaning seeker and am always on the lookout, for what is happening beneath the surface of the ordinary activities of our lives. What he says resonates strongly in me. Yes, I paint flowers and fruit (mostly) and there is always a bit of fear that it will be perceived as trifling, as decoration, as simply pretty. But this is what calls to me. I want to recreate – through my unique view, the aliveness I experience in the world. This is the purpose of the instrument at the center of me. It tells me what to paint, how big it should be, what colors to use – all of it. I do this because I am compelled to make manifest, my experience of the “single significant whole”, that Einstein described.

I look at my earlier work and see that this instrument, wasn’t tuned the way it is now. Some of things I painted, I’d not choose to now. Just like playing a musical instrument, with practice, our “voice” comes through more clearly. You see we all have this instrument – at various levels of attunement. In each of us, it is there to receive and transmit something that is special and unique, in all of existence. It’s the thing that Martha Graham refers to in this famous quote: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.” She’s a dancer, so she talks about action, but I say, there is also a receiver that is uniquely us.

I’m seeing a thread in these posts in the past weeks, that seems to be around the question of “why paint, why create?” My sense, is that there are many answers for this, differing for each of us. We may start out wanting a new hobby or we may be following a long-held desire, to make art that astonishes us. Regardless, I know that by giving ourselves over to our creative desires, we exercise our instruments, revealing to the world something it has never seen before. And I hold that by doing so, we change the course of our lives. Though it may be in tiny increments, we even change the course of all of life.

I want to close by sharing more words from Albert Einstein. He wrote them in a letter to the Queen of Belgium, who was said to be suffering with profound grief.

“And yet, as always, the springtime sun brings forth new life and we may rejoice because of this new life and contribute to its unfolding. And Mozart remains as beautiful and tender as he always was and always will be. There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate and all of our human delusions. And such eternals lie closer to an older person than to a younger one – oscillating between fear and hope. For us there remains the privilege of experiencing beauty and truth in their purest forms.”

This, is why I paint.

With my love,

Cara