Hello once again dear reader and welcome;
This week I was faced with a necessary creative detour. Continuing the under painting of “COMPASS” I realized I need to take a step back and turn to the drawing board-literally. Sensing that I had become stuck in the painting of the head, I felt that by turning to paper I would reconnect to what I was creating in that figure. Common but interesting experience that.
The most deeply satisfying experiences I’ve had drawing and painting has occurred when I am literally creating an image. When I am looking at something to paint or draw and I re-create it, it is a wonderful experience but fundamentally lacking for me in some deep emotional way. Technically it is satisfying but creatively it misses and is like practice or preparatory for some other, later thing. I explained last week that the images I’m sharing with you from my studio exist first inside me and you are witnessing the creative challenge and process of my bringing them to life in the outside world.
So, how does one paint from spirit? We use psychic vision, right? But how do we manifest the vision in paint?
My instinctual way of painting isn’t abstract or expressionistic. My compulsion is some kind of realism-to make representational pictures -at least presently. Perhaps because that is how the visions exist within me, I don’t know, which is why I call it a compulsion. In my mind they exist as representational images, albeit sometimes representational of things that don’t appear to “exist”, but representational still and I expect to depict them as accurately as I can. I am compelled to compose and build and refine and adjust until the painting agrees with the vision.
So I must find a variety of sources that flesh out the details, help me focus on the vision and really figure out how to paint it. Although I believe that we/ I have full access psychically to the vastest encyclopaedia of image reference-which is why when I dream of a horse it is a fully vivid life filled horse with every detail imaginable- I certainly do not have full access yet. So I use what I can in photos and direct observation.
So, now may I take you back to the study from this week? Why doesn’t it look anything like the figure in the painting? The kind of study I was compelled to do this week was most importantly a study of the psyche of the figure. Yes, I am having to work out what furrowed eyebrows and disillusionment looks like in paint, but remember I said I was feeling stuck in the paint? It is the psychology of the man I needed to attune to. I had to do the study to strengthen his energy in my mind. And, yes, this scream is what the figure is feeling.
I keep this recent drawing of the skull in the studio as a similar study that evokes the feeling of what it is that I am building upon when I am building heads in paint.
Dear reader, at the end of the last post I promised that I would begin to reveal to you the theme and symbolism of this painting “COMPASS”. If you are still reading, please be patient with my postponement of this until next week and understand that this creative detour may be a metaphor for moments in our lives; stepping back to the drawing board, re-aligning, gaining more information in order to build our creations…
So I will discuss the theme of the painting next week but for the moment I will leave you with a quote I heard today while listening to astrologer Dane Rudhyar(link below). It contains an essential part of the theme:
“…every person is born because the Universe needs that person at that time in that certain place…”
Until next week,
my sincere gratitude for your time and attention,
Janine
First Steps in the Interpretation of Birth Charts part one