musing on maintaining joy

diptych, oil, meeting with the young tulip poplars

not maintaining any particular state 

comfort discomfort
ever present
raw and tender
I am willing to feel all the waves

awareness maintains awareness
without my effort
distinctly not what is coming and going

the joy that knows
all is held
and given

we are charged with responding
with care
with life
as the spring bloom of red maples
show themselves through the winter branches,
as the young tulip poplars meet me with their white signal.

the fire within has a language of its own

I just spilled over the edge of who I held myself to be,

again.

Now, it doesn’t matter what I think.

again.

I stopped ignoring what I didn’t like to do and realized I had changed,

again.

I was googling me from the inside.

The knife wanted to cut.

I let it feel like cutting.

But I couldn’t cut what I loved any longer

His (this) skin is too thin

His (this) heart too tender

His (this) love too wild and true.

So I put down the knife

and used my hand.

My hands love the body of life

My hands love to support the body of life

My hands love to bring oil to the dry places

And they needed no imagery to do so.

I feel like I just climbed Mount Everest

I am nearly breathless

The air quality here is pure

And I am loosened by the only means I have at my fingertips:

Touch.

I had to get closer 

to feel the touch of myself,

for direct contact with me.

My fingertips and the palm of my hand felt the paint moving with me

Gliding, scratching, slower and more slowly

I listened to the feel of it

this pulse of my life

Living.

Sensual.

Free of the rules I had mistaken for truth

I was listening

and became silent

being the silence

for one pulse.

and another.

Saturated

Red

Permanent rose

Flaming cadmium yellow engulfed a red birch

The black charred trunk remains

Able to hold the glow 

Of the fire that burns in me

Of the fire that moves me out of the old rooms of this house.

All I want to do is follow this thread

It has a language of my own making.

It is in my hands.

the artist's statement

I have always preferred to work in oil.
I am a simple painter and an actively deep muser.
I keep my method and tools simple to alleviate noise as I plumb the depths of my creative process, following the ever changing thread of color.
Intuition leads my paintings into form.
It is my nature to listen and to be led from within.


For the past 15 years I have worked with the painting knife; a simple tool that enables me to express through many layers of color and have the color remain clean and pure.
I scribe into the layers when I find myself in that space beyond words but still drawn to make a point.
There is always this urge to express.
The surface holds my love of color and my joy for the sensual and palpable richness of the paint.


After many years of full spectrum plein air painting, my interest in the painting by and for itself developed and I was drawn back into the studio. I am following my muse ever deeper into my inner process. The process of self expression is my primary interest though the paintings continue to hold reference to the nature of the landscape that surrounds me.
In the larger floral pieces I am working on now, I am using the brush and the knife, as the softening of the liquid oil was necessary to bring this petaled blooming more fully into palpable form.
I am softening and my medium is flowing in response to my own awakening in the body of a woman.

close to home

"It is critical that we feel worthy."
Flora Aube
The Heart is a Portal for Beauty and Light

And the heart is a portal for truth!
Today, I understand the truth and power of this word - critical.

It is absolutely critical that we feel worthy.

I did not feel worthy for many, many, many years.
I was too critical, of myself.
And yet I painted and I showed paintings.
I ping ponged between feeling the best and the worst.
I could not bear to see what I painted for long.
And I destroyed a lot of painting.
The painting on this postcard is from a small exhibit of my work at Lord Fairfax Community College, some time before 2006.

The name of the exhibit was "Close to Home."
I destroyed the painting, let it go to hold another painting,
because no one "wanted" it.

It is clear for me that I could not own it myself.

The woman standing at her home is me.
And today I can see she is also the goddess Lakshmi, pouring golden blessings from her hand.
And I can see and feel Hecate dressed in black even though I don't know much about her. As the asteroid Hecate she is a dark moon goddess who stands at the crossroads between the visible and invisible worlds. She can bring the need to live in day to day reality home to us.
If I had not reacted in fear to the strength she exhibited, I could have learned from the forms that I intuitively painted and felt worthy of the mirror they offered to me.

Ah, now a memory arises. I painted that painting from an old photo I saw of a local woman standing in her garden.

I forgot. 
I was trying to remember myself through her. 

It is no mistake, that I forgot 
and that I remember, through women,
who I am.

I have been able to hear my sister Flora and understand her work as my heart opens, no longer afraid of our differences or the certainty she shares in her process.
I have remembered who I am through the circle of Awakening Women Institute, led by Chameli Ardagh, no longer afraid of the multitude of forms and gifts woman embodies.
It is no mistake that I have come home again, returning to a home studio after three years of being in a group space at River District Arts.
And it is no mistake that I am writing this morning for Wild Woman Rising, a piece in response to Mel Shapcott's question/prompt - where is your heart?

My heart is close to home.
And home is family and a few friends, mountains and woods and rivers.

It is critical to feel worthy of love and beauty
then it rushes to "curl up at your feet" as Franz Kafka once wrote -
in his own way.

I am closer to home every day, in my own way, in this body.
In every moment that the gap closes, I am simply home. Period. Present.
In this awareness of the flow of life and death, I am home as life itself, as Woman.

It is critical that we feel worthy of our way of being and creating and living.
May you be home in your way.

There is work to be done and celebrated.
It is critical to know,
where is your heart?

memo - what is crone time

one thing that is suddenly apparent to me, at 60, is that the definition of who I am is no longer fixed.
 I am none of the definitions I have collected to name and confirm myself. 

I am much freer in truth than any of those names - mother, sister, beloved, writer, friend and even artist. Most particularly artist is falling by the way side. 

I was not prepared for this. And now that I sense what has been happening is a loosening of identity,  I can relax a bit more. I have been really physically stressed, and not knowing why.

Writing serves me to communicate. 
Painting serves me to express what words cannot touch. 
Everything is working out just fine.

What prompted me to see this change just now, was seeing the paintings of the winner of an "important" art thing I applied for. I had felt sure my paintings could hold the space of this show, and I was rejected. 

This is not the kind of rejection that really hurts me, it is more of an 'ok, thank you for guiding me' kind of thing.  The rejections that do hurt say the same thing...go this way, Barbara, it just sometimes takes me longer to say thank you!

When I looked at the work of the young (born 1980) winner, I saw what the art world I was asking to be in, says is a viable and interesting artist. 

And I paused, and said, thank goddess.
I am being lead to want the life I live.

The impulse in me to share takes many forms.

Life is finding how to share itself through me with the world. 
The internet is the mother supporting so many connections.
We find one another.

And I could not have found my way here without being able to express myself in words. 
everything is coming together,
this is the co creative crone time.

written in 2013, still pondering the wonder of croning in 2015

the door of the heart

sometimes my personal silence takes on form and color.
I don't know what led paint to my heart door.
It was, however, open.

heart door is only and always open.

Framing the Immeasurable

I have been painting for years but never really noticed that intuition was leading the way and could indeed be fully given the reins until I saw that the paintings do just fine without me. I mean, of course I play a part but not as much as you might think.

But where this really gets challenging is when the framing begins. The panels are rarely square. And I love to float the panels to give the paintings some space.

Here I am today wrangling with a painting and a beautiful floater frame. I set the wood strips behind the painting just a bit too far from the edge and now I am in the "fix it the best way I can" mode. 

It is not my favorite part of the process because this measurement thing always shows up.

After all, the framing brings in the part of me that thinks I do have to do it perfectly; that is, that I have to find just the right fit. 

I wouldn't be writing this, ready to "publish" if I thought I had to do this perfectly. 

Today I practiced with compassion for myself, humor and loving kindness.

The voices were there egging me on but not as loud as they have been before. 

It might have had something to do with Her.

She is beautiful, regal, grounded as all get out. 

She embodies abundance.

That is how I feel her.

The frame will hold her. The spaces around her may be uneven. I may still hear the 'less than pro' voices wiggling my inner ear.

But "Zephyr's Lakshmi Harvest" will stand her ground and love me for my aptitude for the immeasurable.

How can one frame the immeasurable?

We always have the chance to find the door that opens rather than closes.  

It just takes some imagination and a kind eye.

drawing to see

Sometimes I draw from the paintings and find new ways to see the painting. 
I like what is happening spatially with this one. 
I begin to see forms that have a life of their own.
I like birch skin.

things change!

Energy is released as things change!

Lebensfreude 24x24 inches oil on panel

now and then

Now I am in Germany and then I was in Virginia. 

To follow this path of painting from inside out I chose to walk again in those fields behind my home in Virginia. 
What I long for here in Germany is space and the feeling of being at home.

As I painted, I began to smell the air and the grasses of the fields behind my house in Virginia. 
I was moving through rooms in houses I once lived in. 
I invited myself to feel into the apparent nearness of these past experiences . 

I give meaning to some parts of it.
It is made of two parts, one sits above the other.  

The green snake in the grass in the foreground is my ally when the demon of fear shows up hungry at my door. 
At the door to my home is a bowl, ready to feed whoever comes knocking- Fear- Doubt-Envy-Reason.

I like that none of the marks need to have meaning for me, they just are. 
I don't have to finalize the experience with meaning to find its "rightness." 
I can ride down the river of color as it flows. 
I enjoy the ride. 
I have a good seat.

field grasses

Inspired from one of the last studies I made of the back field in Harris Hollow, the afternoon before the cutting began.

I remember the sense of fleeting time, the need to get all this, somehow, in paint: the moving, thick grasses, the subtle color of the various plants, the fullness of it all, thinking it would be the last time I would be there to paint it. 

This is such a familiar experience of mine, of overwhelming beauty out of time and the urge to paint, to "have" it, which is in time. 
As well as the full onslaught of thoughts whispering "it is not possible."

It is not possible to hold it.
It is possible to enter it and get as close to it as I can. 
It brings me to the edge of reason, and I just have to jump. 

Such a field it is....my backyard for three years. 
Endless space and color and light and air. 

Now I am wanting to find this in me, however I can make it appear. 
Using the study, I splashed this into being to continue to reconnect with what the field is for me. 

It feels like a landscape and it is large enough that it can stand on its own someday, as feeling in color. 
It is a good beginning.

Field Grasses oil on panel 100cm x 100cm

compassionate awareness

I am now nearing the end of my first year here in Germany. The paintings are changing. I am changing. I have watched myself not paint or draw this year. I watched myself think I would keep painting, that I would not fall out of this conversation with myself. And I did, often. Now I am making a commitment to show up each day in this conversation I have with myself in paint. Because it is important to me. It brings me joy and wonder. It brings me to questions that only I can answer for myself. This life I have lived with drawing and painting is a gift that loves to express itself. That is still my job. To support her. No matter what the voices say. This is the second part of the journey. Compassionate awareness is being given a larger role in this play. I can't do it without her support.

"The Seed" oil on panel 100cm x 60cm

an open field

This is one of the last paintings I made in late summer, before moving to Germany. 
The field had been kept uncut for weeks this summer and the grasses were dense and layered. 

The sky kept moving and the grasses, too, as it was painted.

I especially like that I had a light hand and could move with the clouds and the breezes through the grass.

a new beginning

This is a new beginning. 

I will post the image of the Virginia Woods as I did before, and look forward to keeping my ducks (at the very least the password and correct email address) in a row to be able to continue this blog in the future. 

My idea is to share my life through the art I make as well as my musings on the inner landscape of my opening heart. 

The Virginia Wood is the jumping off place, as I begin this next part of my life, living in the landscape of southern Bavaria.


A Virginia Wood, 12x12 oil on panel 2009
My Vision is not 20/20