Dream: “something blue, covering the whole thing, light blue…”
Journal in my lap I glance up, coffee cup in hand. Sweet creamy date bread, the taste of home, mom’s recipe fills my mouth. Crunching a piece of walnut between my teeth ~ I recognize the same lavender blue in the painting across the room.
Radiant Beauty
I’d just written about her yesterday, how a fusion of abstract landscape melded with realistic rendering on this painting called, “Radiant Beauty.”
I’d noted that the pond represented home to me, the safe place where I can be myself. And how my paintings beckon viewers to see the Creative Spirit above their own pond.
My Place in the Sun?
Two images flash to mind: tiny paintings from yesterday afternoon’s meditation exercise. The first an old one called, “My Place in the Sun,” repainted on New Year’s Eve with a violet mountain, vermilion cottages and turquoise green fields.
Supermoon Rising
The second, a new painting, inspired by momentum from the first. A similar landscape with cottages and distant hills. This one with deep violet night shadows, opening to those blue fields and pond.
Celestial orbs in both paintings, low to the horizon, burn deeply vermilion, warming cottages, hearts and home. A setting sun in the first is transformed to “Supermoon Rising” in the next breath. It is amazing to me still ~ how a color meditation can reveal such a tale.
Home
In an instant ~ I realize I have wandered into my own painting. Standing beside the pond (literally, as there is a pond outside my studio windows), I painted my way home.
Returning to the studio feels strangely new this morning. Switching on the lights, I turn up the heat and survey the paintings. Not just that today is the first day of a new year ~ something else is new.
Two unfinished paintings on the easels speak now, when yesterday were silent. The tall one with a moon behind the cloud, now answers my question about whether or not she is finished.
She’s not at all finished. Indeed her supermoon is rising, illuminating the blue landscape with colorful shadows. Her true work is just begun.
“Paint the moon a bit larger.
“Let it light the landscape.
“And fill those long shadows with hope and dreams.”
Awakened by her light shining through my bedroom window, I’d felt bathed by something Divine. Instead of covering my head with the pillow ~ I let the celestial moment comfort me as I drifted back to sleep.
The Castle
The other big painting, a wide one with a castle atop a vineyard on a hill ~ appears light against vibrant evergreen woodlands and a star-filled, Provence blue sky. Cottages coming together form the castle, supported and unified by the expansive vineyard rising from the valley.
Supermoon Dream ~ Is it My Place in the Sun? Or just a Dream?
In a moment all the symbols embedded in the paintings fuse seamlessly as my story. Spirited palette knife strokes ~ like my signature ~ are mine alone to own.
I was that freshman in art history class, who sat in the back muttering ~ “the professor is nuts, the painting is just a landscape ~ how could he think the artist stopped to make up all these ridiculous symbols?”
I own this garden, it’s time to eat my words. I don’t know what artists in the Renaissance did. I do know it’s taken me a lifetime to accept and own the Creator’s gifts as my own.
Welcome to Joy’s Garden!
xxoo
Dorothy
