Both hope and grief are things with feathers.

In Porter's book, a crow represents grief, the thing with feathers, and the thing which landed in our home this week.  Our sweet girl, Lilly, is gone, and our tiny tribe of four is now three.

I didn't know if or how the art could help.

Silly me.

These two paintings have been watching me, waiting for their moment, which is apparently now.  Wild things with feathers, each a set of hope and grief, encouraging and comforting.  They are odd birds which began as exaggerations of crows, and then became their own things entirely.  Which hope and grief can do, as well. 

Porter writes: “Perfect devices:...crows. [They] can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.” ​ Oh.  The power of feathers.

Something monstrous is coming in October!

THE DOWNSIDE OF LYCANTHROPY
opens Oct 1 here and at Unlimited IPA in Portland, Oregon
​
​Werewolves, vampires, monsters and more.  
​Just in time for the spookiest month of all.

"Simply Understanding" - oil on Yupo, 19.5 x 24.5.  Available here, at Artfinder and at Bluethumb.


​What’s one area of your life that you keep trying to “solve” instead of simply understanding? This doesn’t have to necessarily be a relationship either. People try to “solve” their health problems with fad diets, when often they first need to develop an awareness of the emotions that enable the problems in the first place. 

In my own life, I’ve often tried to “solve” my creativity by over-planning books and projects, when really I just needed to sit down and create and understand what I was feeling. - MARK MANSON

Here in the studio,  the love affair with pink continues.  This time bouncing off the pink in an abstractscape form.

And Manson's words arrived in my in-box right on time - I am a "solver" - I throw my efforts at solving things before I even truly understand them.  In my creative life, yes, but also in my regular life and in relationships.  Trying to solve something feels active, empowered, strong.  Trying to sit with it and feel it feels risky, vulnerable, exposed, naked.

Manson encourages us to listen to others more instead of attempting to provide solutions, but also (and more importantly) to listen to ourselves.  To not fix, to not push away, to just feel it and understand why it is there in the first place.

And so I practice this in the paint, hoping it will ooze out into the rest of my world. 

How about you, dear reader?  Are you a solver?  Or do you sit with and understand things? Leave a comment below.  One lucky reader will win a small original piece of art, just for being vulnerable.  Yay!

Here at Malarkey Central, there is a lot of pink going on.

It began with a vague idea of things with pink balloons.  Which led to all sorts of shenanigans.  And then appeared the cowboys.  Isn't  there a color called cowboy pink?

Color can surprise us - pink can be sorrowful as well as syrupy.  It can be scary as well as soothing.  And because we don't expect it to be anything other than sweet, in these other contexts it opens something in the heart before we can begin to put up our defenses.  The ultimate in sneaky.

​As it often happens with the art, this piece remained silent until we were reading The Sisters Brothers (for the second time), and I knew there was a thread connecting that couple of hit-men-for-hire in the old west with this contemplative cowboy.  

Sorrow creeps up on everyone from time to time.