Longing for Visible Form

"Longing for Visible Form" - oil on deep cradled wood, 14" x 11" x 1.5".  Ready to hang (back has been pre-wired for hanging).  Available here and at Artfinder.

Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives.

- JOHN O'DONOHUE, Anam Cara

This week I've been contemplating the physical body and its function as a bridge between inner and outer worlds.  I find myself in the company of a small (but growing) community of people whose bodies are highly sensitive to things - often chemicals, mold,  and allergens but also energy and emotion.   I am surprised by how often we (and by "we" I mean myself, especially) try to override our body's messages.

Longing for Visible Form

"Your  mind can deceive you and put all kinds of barriers between you and your nature; but your body does not lie.  Your body tells you, if you attend to it, how your life is and whether you are living from your soul or from the labyrinths of your negativity," writes O'Donohue.

It is so easy, when the busyness of life and the barrage of media  heaps things on top of us, to treat the messages of the body as symptoms to be subdued instead of clues to a more significant situation which wants our undivided attention for a minute or two.  This week, I am going to sit in my body (and less in my mind - heavens help me is that even possible?) and see what it has to say.  With any luck, it will also want to paint. 

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​About the art:  This is the final painting inspired by  the Expressive Seascapes course with Pauline Agnew.  In this one, an acrylic painting (left) was turned sideways and used as a compositional structure for a seascape.  Oil over acrylic allows a lovely scraping back and peeking through of some of the under forms and colors, which makes the final piece particularly well-layered and interesting.   You can see the remains of the moon in the lower right of the final painting, as if the sea had swallowed the moon, or as if it were reflected from a position outside of the painting.

All of my completed paintings are now hiding in corners, knowing full well I am looking at them with new eyes and wanting to vandalize them in the near future. :)