painting

Sojourner Truth’s Legacy Gets Personal

When I lived in rural Connecticut, I dreamed one night of Sojourner Truth and a magical garden that, in the dream, she was cultivating with people of all races coming together to grow miraculously abundant food. I painted in honor of that dream, and the painting recently sold to Chaz Ebert, who is in the process of creating a major project to honor Sojourner’s life and legacy. I painted a second portrait of Sojourner (she gave the other as a gift) especially for Chaz and her Sojourner project. And now, as if Sojourner herself (and Chaz’s husband Roger Ebert, from his place in heaven?) the project is “gaining a life of its own” as Chaz so well put it. Now Chaz has commissioned me to paint 3 more, two for direct descendants of Sojourner Truth (!) and a third for another iconic trailblazer, Gloria Steinem. The spiritual momentum has me giddy with joy.

(My portrait of Sojourner for Chaz Ebert/ 2019). 

Stream Drawings in Water Color Offer Up Surprises

Water Color Stream Drawing/ August 2019

I’ve been doing stream drawings (stream drawing is a drawing meditation technique I developed and you can see more at MAKING MARKS: Discover the Art of Intuitive Drawing/Simon and Schuster) with studio visitors and it is enlivening, relaxing and at times profound.  Playful, creative (our natural state of being, in essence!) presence at times springs forth wisdom, conscious awareness in the form of surprise and delight, and gives us the chance to see things in new, unexpected ways.  Book your stream drawing session time with me and let’s see where it takes us.

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″

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.

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!

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.

Earth Changes/Pole Shift: Cone of Uncertainty

A recent painting from the Earth Changes Series (recently on exhibition at Art/Place Gallery)

The seer and healer, Edgar Cayce, spoke of extreme changes in our climate that would include storms, fires, floods, earth quakes and volcanic eruptions. In his trance state, he saw such drastic weather patterns and events that until somewhat recently seemed predictions of the future. Our poles would shift, he warned, and they are, which brings with it a lot of chaos. I see it in the way people are interacting (we are very polarized politically, for example) as well as in nature. I hope that within this chaos we manage to find harmony. These paintings seek to allow harmony, to well wish us to ride out the storm of extremes with a sense of peace.