A True Muse: Kris Landt

Kris Landt in Her World   acrylic on canvas 36″x36″

I love painting people, and as a figurative artist people and the human figure inspire me more than any other subject. Artists often come upon someone so unusually inspiring or exciting or interesting or beautiful (or all of these, such as in my case) that they become kind of obsessed with studying them. An artist seeks a muse–a powerful catalyst stirring passion and creative momentum. 

This is what I have found in Kris Landt (Dr Kris Landt), formerly Mazur. I have known her since I was 13 going on 14. She is brilliant, beautiful and capable of excellence in anything she endeavors. She inspired me from youthful days when we would create together, but whatever she made was always so much better than whatever I made, so much so that I was petulant once and demanded to keep a wire and cloth flower she had created. I just had to have it.

Now she has stirred that kind of inspiration in me again, in part due to the complete creative freedom and expression she allows those in her circle (most importantly her talented musician sons, Nick and Rory, who have successful a band, Landt). She commissioned me to paint something for her, although I had already been painting her–she is statuesque and has a quality that is hard not to want to capture in paint. I just had to paint her.

So, this is part one of what will be a diptych, basically. This is Kristyna in her world of wonderment, with her sons (and I didn’t know they once raised box turtles!) and her little dogs, her culinary magic at play. I can’t wait to paint part 2. The painting includes cookbook imagery from the 1960s since she used to get in trouble reading cookbooks under the covers past bedtime!  I am so enthralled by the new work I’m generating because of Kris’ spirit and essence.

(And the following new still life pieces are born out of my painting of Kris) 

Still Life with Radishes acrylic on panel 8″x10″

Still Life with Peaches acrylic on panel 8″x10″

Still Life with Grapefruit  acrylic on canvas 11″x14″

New Work: Earth Changes/Pole Shift: Rapids I and Tectonic Plates

I’m happy to say most of the paintings in my series, “Earth Changes/Pole Shift” based on the early 20th Century predictions of Edgar Cayce have sold. I am still enthralled with our ever-polarized world and so the series continues. Usually I’d think of polarization being visually shown with opposites (black/white for example) but life doesn’t feel exactly like that in our stressful political climate, our relationships with one another, especially those who don’t see things the way we do. What it feels like to me is a tension-filled push and pull, and we go around with extreme weather personalities or reactions. We erupt, storm, surge, crack up and tussle with ourselves and one another. And yet, as one woman pointed out, these paintings always show, “a way out.” There is a way out, and we have to allow it out together.

Earth Changes/Pole Shift: Rapids I  acrylic on canvas 36″x36″

 

Earth Changes/Pole Shift: Tectonic Plates  acrylic on canvas 36″x36″

Let Me Paint You Into a Garden

Doesn’t the world feel very extreme and polarized? In my series Earth Changes/Pole Shift, I’ve painted with the intention to bring a visual/emotional harmony in the negative emotions despite the conflict. And now I’m offering to put you in a garden or enchanted forest. All is not lost and we are not only wandering in a wasteland of sorrow, there is also beauty, unending. Souls can’t be degraded, let’s focus on our souls instead of all the fighting and misery. If enough of us remain centered (loving, forgiving) maybe what is ugly out there will begin to transform through our good gestures and essence of positivity. The price range for these commissions are the same as for Spirit Paintings–see Spirit Paintings here on my site for more info or contact me directly through the site. (These are healing-painting- meditation artworks.)

With Thunder in the Dwelling/8th grade  Acrylic on canvas 36″x36″

 

In Her Enchanted Forest Acrylic on canvas 8″x10″

Passport to Wellness at Indigo!

Come join us at Indigo on Nov 18th at 3-6 pm EST. We are hosting a fun event to celebrate the many ways we can elevate our wellness and embody wellbeing. This event will be fun and interesting with such excellent practitioners to meet and learn about. Register on FB or contact Indigo Wellness at 404-370-1151.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Guilt is the Ego’s Way of Entrapping Us

Detail of a work in progress

Transitional times often are full of resistance due to negative emotions such as guilt. Guilt can be the first step in acknowledging responsibility for mistakes once made, yet guilt is also the ego’s successful way of entrapping us (ego does not like to let go of pain because it is one of the ways that it knows itself–the ego wants identifiers and pain and guilt do feed the ego-self which needs blame in order to hold others and self hostage–it is a control thing).

Often people will “guilt you” for not doing as they’d like you to do, or by reminding others where they/we fell short. And we often do that to those around us. Since none of us are perfect, the most kind people of all may be rendered excessively hurt by someone laying guilt upon them, and the one receiving the accusations may then disallow harmony as a way of self punishing. Forgiveness purifies all of this: we forgive ourselves, we forgive the accusers and we forgive our ego for trying to hold on to negative emotion. What if everyone said,”I’m sorry, I love you. You and I made and make mistakes, but we are only human”–wouldn’t that be great? Sometimes there is no way to resolve an issue except from within, which is to embrace forgiveness on our own terms, whether the people around us are able to do so or not. And they may have not even asked us for forgiveness. Do it anyway to set yourself free. And set yourself free again by not allowing others to guilt you into paralysis or self misery.

Don’t hold on to guilt, but grab forgiveness and see if you feel so wonderful you alight your path in the blink of an eye with tremendous love and joy.

Viktor Frankl’s Powerful Choice

Detail of a recent painting in progress/2018

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl survived the brutality of the Holocaust by remaining present within his own mind and heart, by not giving away his attitude. “One’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” can be that one element that allows a human being, even in the most dire of situations, to survive on his/her own terms.

Most of us don’t know what a bad day really, really is, but Frankl and millions more endured the unthinkable. Frankl’s living example demonstrates the power of choice; we do not have to think of ourselves as surrendering, but more so empowering ourselves to inwardly, fiercely keep our strength,   to “choose our own way.”

 

Spirit Painting Meditations

This is a recent Spirit Painting I was commissioned to create. These are very different from my other work (abstract and other figurative work) because I meditate while creating it for the person who commissioned it (or for their loved one). I paint what comes. It is a very surprising process for me as the painter but for the recipient, too. These are done for a mitzvah (read that as a “good deed”) and I charge next to nothing for them, but I feel strongly that I should make them available for anyone who might want one, which means the commission fee is very low. Check out others here on my site, under the Spirit Painting heading at the banner. And of course contact me via this site if you’d like one!

Being Creative Means Being Playful

This is an ink drawing (with colored pencil) from one of my many, many sketchbooks. Allowing for time to draw everyday in a playful way opens us up to our creative power and serves as a portal to the unexpected in the way of ideas, realizations and higher consciousness. Really, being playful while drawing does that? Yes, it does. The issue is most people don’t feel playful while drawing because they feel like the drawing has to be “good” and so they are listening to an inner critic who stops that process from unfolding. This is why I teach people to draw freely, a method I call “stream drawing”, a way of accessing stream of consciousness while drawing. It is very simple, and fun and well worth trying! For example, look at this stream drawing below. I saw in it a penguin w/ an egg, and colored it in (not shown). You might see something different–maybe it is a hummingbird hovering near a flower? Turning it around, there is many other ways to see this image. 

Epic Spring II: Our Choices and Destiny

Earth Changes Series/Pole Shift: Epic Spring II

This new painting in the series is currently at Art/Place Gallery in Fairfield, CT. In the meditative state I entered painting it, I felt that swell of momentum reminding me of great ocean waves. Even stepping just a few feet into the breaking waves, there is a power so tremendous, so epic. And when we are subjected to the tide, we succumb to it. We may play with it, but it is with the understanding that the force within each crashing arc of salt water, there is incomprehensible power. We in your physical form are but a moment of time upon a shore that raged thousands of years before we were present, and this same rising and falling, according to its attraction to the moon and the sun, will breathe in and breathe out long after we are all gone in our current form. White horses run toward us, crashing at our feet, as we stand in “the tide of time and light” as it says in the Siddur. Our time is upon us with each wave, our choices and destiny.