Soft Impulses

Soft Impulses

"Soft Impulses" - oil on Yupo, 11.5 x 17 inches. (click on the image to purchase)

"...we can go below our hardened ways to the soft impulses that birth them. Instead of breaking the bone of our stubbornness, we can nourish the marrow of our feeling unheard. Instead of breaking the bone of our fear, we can cleanse the blood of our feeling unsafe. Instead of counting the scars from being hurt in the world, we can find and re-kiss the very spot in our soul where we began to withhold our trust.”― MARK NEPO, The Book of Awakening

Murderbot Month has ended, but still I wander in the land of  robots and cyborgs.  Nepo's words take us beneath the hardened exoskeleton of the artificial beings, down to the organic bits of our core.

Do you count the scars life has given?  Or go head to head with your fears?   Or try to break your own stubbornness? (me, me - I raise my hand - look at all these scars!)  I thought it worked - until it didn't.  I recently learned that it isn't enough - nope nope nope.  We've got to go below all of that; deeper, more vulnerable, more risky.  There's something at the core that wants nourishment, cleansing and kisses.  Go past that toughness, beyond the tenacity, leap over the strength and resilience until you land in the thick of it.

The irony is, you have to be tough to go there.  You need to be resilient to find the soft impulses.  Your strength is required to find, face and love what lies below our hardened ways.​  

So grab your backpack, stuff it full of your badassery, and let's go there.

---

About the art - sometimes the AI bot surprises you in the inspiration images it creates.  It cannot create a mermaid or a centaur no matter what you tell it, and I've learned to lower my expectations accordingly.  But ask it to make a series of cyborg  madonnas and it will give you endless images of  odd mother-figures and some really, really weird babies.  Ignoring the weird ones, I focused on the images that were both heart-touching and compositionally pleasing in the inspiration for creating this painting.  Beginning with unprimed Yupo, I sketched in the figure shape and added background with oil-thinned paint.  Layers of thinned paint on the bodies.  Burnishing off the wet layers with a soft cloth where I wanted highlights.  The Yupo is lovely this way - it becomes stained but not thickened, allowing a lot of movement and working back into the layers.  As always, resisting the urge to overly define or get fussy.