Description
I’m a conservationist. I feel a strong need to make use of everything I can. This painting, at least painted in this shape and size, came to be because I had this piece of paper that was 20″x40.” I’ve painted a few 40″x40″ paintings out of Arches 60″x40″ sheets of watercolor paper, leaving me leftover pieces. It’s good paper, I must make use of it! I toyed with the idea of making two 20″x20″ paintings of somethiing. But, I had this wide image… I’ve been contemplating painting this image for much longer than I’ve had the paper. It’s yet another from the no-longer-there lily ponds on the southside of Kauai. And it’s old enough that it was actually taken with a film camera. I was attracted to it because of the intense blue. It took some collaging in Photoshop – I’m so grateful to my former boss, Steve Kimball for teaching me these skills. They’ve become integral to my art-making and help me realize the artistic visions of the painters in my groups too.
I started this piece on last year’s trip to Kauai – which ended up being a trip when I really needed to rest and hardly painted. Once home last summer, I wasn’t feeling it. I needed to move on to paint the hot colors of Jubilee. I brought it along on this year’s trip, when I did have the energy to paint more. It was one that was a challenge to appreciate myself. Though there were moments when it was very fun to paint, it was coming through quite loose and imprecise – not how I usually paint and I wasn’t sure about the result. But others appreciated it quite a bit, so I pressed on. I painted all the flowers last. This helped me. It took painting them in to see any dimension. I was in Light Rain scanning it for making prints with my friend Julia, who, (at the time of this writing) works there. Musing on what to call it, I thought about floating, and the primordial soup and somewhere in there I used the term “dancing.” Julia kept saying “I like ‘dancing.'” I had also been playing around with possible Hawaiian words. So, what is “dancing” in Hawaiian? “Hula” hit the right note. On top of it being easy to say and remember, I looked up the history and legend surrounding “hula.” The legend goes that the gods created the world through sacred chant and dance – hula. Out of the primordial soup dances the world.
June 2015
