Welcome Home Your Emptiness

Welcome Home Your Emptiness

"Welcome Home Your Emptiness" - acrylic on repurposed wood panel, 24" x 10.5" x 1" .  Ready to hang (sides are painted; no need to frame.  Hanging wire is attached). Part of the series "A View From the Gorge".  Available here and at Artfinder.

When the old ghosts come back
to feed on everywhere you felt sure,
do not strengthen their hunger
by choosing to fear;
rather, decide to call on your heart
that it may grow clear and free
to welcome home your emptiness
that it may cleanse you
like the clearest air
you could ever breathe.

from "For Loneliness" by John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

Now and again (and again, and again) the "old ghosts" return, shredding confidence and making me question all I thought I knew of the thing that is me.  They are sneaky, those ghosts, gliding in on the back of words spoken, looks cast, a song that brings back a time when....

I am learning.  Learning to recognize them, to call them what they are, to set them firmly outside and ask them to leave.  Sometimes I win.  Other times the ghosts win.  O'Donohue asks me to "welcome home my emptiness" - that very thing I am always trying to fill.  Sigh.  I am learning.  

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About the art:  First, my apologies!  I have no process pics and no video.  This piece began between other paintings, as an intuitive attempt at the feeling I had while hiking in the gorge two days prior.  The sun!  The mist!  The imposing cliffs!  A surreal view that made me gasp and think "is this really my life?" and become teary at the wonder of it all.  The muse had her way with this one.  Acrylic paint directly on old, heavily textured board. The striations in the board informed the cliffs, which are vertical chunks of basalt in the gorge, evidence of their rugged birth and the pressure of being born.  Painted with palette knife, paper towels and a rubber wedge. Here are a few of the actual views from that hike: