Lean Into the Wind of Our Days

"Lean Into the Wind of Our Days" - mixed media on wood panel (plywood, uncradled) 20" x 16".  Available here and at Artfinder.

​We must protect and keep the small flame we carry from being blown out, we must lean into the wind of our days, and we must accept and not run from the shadow we cast for being human.  
- MARK NEPO, The Exquisite Risk

It is an odd  and wonderful synchronicity to be simultaneously painting abstracted seascapes and also nearing the end of another soul-bending Nepo book.  His words inform the paintings, and then the paintings reach into the book and grab more words for themselves.  Like these:

Nothing is solved on our journey, not in life or in a book.  Rather, we are, through love and suffering, ushered into a wakeful living that clarifies and softens our experience into something irreducible and precious.

Oh yes.  Wakeful living is not for the timid, I tell you.  And I am a little saddened to think that nothing is solved on this journey, though.  Yet there is a sweet freedom, perhaps, in giving up all the effort to find solutions and pour it into living instead.

Lean Into the Wind of Our Days

If you can stand one more quote (hang in there, dear reader!), this one speaks to me of my own inner rebellion of the last couple of years along with maybe something more universal that we're all experiencing during tumultuous times:

I know, for me, it has taken half a century to cross some ocean in myself.  And finally, what I feel is what I say and what I say is what I mean.  What I mean is that others, so used to my gargantuan efforts to be good, don't understand my efforts to be real.  They find me coming up short.  But I'm simply burning old masks.

I promise not to burn my covid masks (of which I am curating quite a collection).  Just the odd metaphorical mask which stands between the real me and the world. 

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About the painting:  beginning with an image merge (courtesy of Image Blender) of one of my sketches and a photo from a trip to Ireland, a rough composition was drawn on plywood.  Drawing with a paintbrush and making many directional marks, then glazing and moving the wet paint with a rubber wedge, squeegee and at several points my own hands.  More directional marks with the edge of the rubber wedge and liberal use of a water bottle and sprayer.

​It appears that 80 million is about the right number of layers for all paintings.  So if you have less than that, get back to work. :)