The eye of outward sense is as the palm of a hand.
The whole of the object is not grasped in the palm.
The sea itself is one thing, the foam another; Neglect the foam, and regard the sea with your eyes. ~
E H Whinfield

I had noticed a few social media posts related to a creative new moon.

I could do with some cosmic energy to recharge my creativity.

This time last year I was in the midst of difficult change during my mother’s final unsettled and painful months. 

Since she died I have been adroit at avoiding my studio, the canvas, materials of all shapes and sizes and the agony of sitting alone with my brain in the vulnerable state of mush that grief imposes. This grief has triggered all kinds of old miseries that I pushed away without complete resolution. I moved through my days without meaning or purpose; closed down and empty.

Until grief’s distress hit me with all the force of a ten ton truck I was busy, functioning and superficially productive. But not creative. Not healed.

So now I am trying a new approach; putting two strong creative techniques together to create a third potent practice. Intuitive painting plus Light-Writing together with an intention to spawn change, to shape-shift: transformation, transubstantiation, transmogrification. A rebirth is what I seek. Not merely a change but an evolution. The crack between the two processes is where something happens; where the smudge may evolve.
​Meditation has become an essential ingredient in the alchemy. A silence without incantation; wordless spells. I sit and try not to think.

This weekend was that creative new moon in some sign or another. My desire for an original and inspired time was in the stars. I was hungry to find a productive outlet; to paint and write and find some peace beyond.

My Dearest Darling makes the breakfast at the weekend. An Irish spread with scrambled eggs (he’s got this down to a fine art, he’s a perfectionist). Toast with bitter marmalade and coffee. He’s a coffee connoisseur. Fragrant freshly ground beans in a rich liquified extract (did I mention he’s a perfectionist?).
​
Adventurously, the breakfast was Heston Blumenthal-ed. Somehow (I declined to ask for details), the coffee and the eggs entwined. He took an executive decision to continue to cook those eggs. It was Sunday. There were no more eggs in the house. The breakfast evolved into something between frog spawn and cat sick, but funny. Inedible but hilarious. Inventive and bravely inspired. Highly creative. Gross, but somehow just what I needed. It was refreshing and endearing to see my man’s human flaws.

Social media is usually a polished façade. It hides all the mess and confusion, the frayed edges and the ugly beginnings. I love posting images but social media is tireless. It devours hours of works in an instant, the gaping mouth calling for more posts, unsatisfied, insatiable. I am tired of the black hole, the void, into which my work falls. Once posted my painting feels used. With its image on the web it takes on a cloak of ‘done, been there, what’s next?’.

Once the gloom of an artist’s block envelopes you, perfectionism is the monster in the dark. The effort and the learning are disregarded. We all need to produce messy images. We need permission to engage with chaos and disorder. My brain is in turmoil. I need to honour my dis-ease. Judgement is anathema to creativity. I need to produce messy images. I’m giving myself permission to engage with chaos and disorder and to find the joy within. 

My painting may evolve into pond sediment but painting helps me to feel alive.
​
I will push past my reluctance to feel and the perfectionism stirred up in the wake of grief to enjoy my messy images. It is time to follow the colours that stir my brain to cry and to sigh in frustration but that also enable me to rediscover joy and to laugh with pleasure. 

During the summer I joined an online writing group. We had a few tasks to challenge us. One of the last was to meditate in silence before writing the alotted 500 words. I found it both excrutiating and exhilarating. I rediscovered my love for meditation. It has been re-established as a part of my everyday life.
If you have read my posts you will be aware of issues with my hands. I wrote this as a message to myself from the perspective of an outside force. If you can relate to your own needs please follow the guidance of this higher power and enjoy.
​

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”

​Rumi

I found this task of meeting the silence initially spun me into anguish. I became an angry pirate-self. It took me a while to discover the gift in this change of perspective and seeing myself from a distance. The writing was alchemy. Seamus Heaney guided me to begin. So. It was how he began Beowolf.

I don’t know if it’s true that pirates wore eye patches over one eye so that as they stormed the interior darkness of a vulnerable ship’s cabin they could flip up the patch and that eye was already adjusted to the dark. This angry, irrational me felt like a criminal and all at sea.
 
Meeting the Silence 
 
So.
This pirate self.
She’s down here in the dark. Her senses are blank. Her preparations for enduring the dark of silence inadequate, incomplete. Her eye patch is lost.
She pauses. Enveloped by the hostile shadow. It takes time to adjust. In this frame of mind she wants instant relief. The gloom sucks her into its clutches and she grabs for any straw, ready to take everything down into the depths with her.
Blind and lost: Disorientated, discombobulated. The blackness swirls around her. Disturbed. Bewildered. She is wild. Accept. Be wilder. Wild in tooth and claw the animal within cries in fear and distress. Backed into a corner, defensive, afraid.
This brute organism is her means of defence. Listen.
This visceral beast has been mistreated. It yearns for love. It cries to be nurtured. It cries out for recognition, respect and appreciation. Look again. Do not reprimand. Do not strike out. Do not try to soothe. It’s not ready.

Stop and bow.
Close your eyes and see this creature’s agony. It’s your pain.

She is angry and afraid, neglected and imprisoned. Trapped and mistreated. She is right to cry. Open your mouth and howl with her. Share the pain.

Stand your ground. You belong on this earth. You are folded. Unfurl. Take up the space assigned to you. Breathe deeply of the air that is your birth right.

It is time.

You have played small too long.

It is not safe to pretend smallness and to shrink; feet neat, arms close and closed.
Stand in your space, legs solid. Feet planted. The ground will support you. You belong. Stop rushing. Be long. You do not need more time. You have all the time you need. Now. Be here. Share your feelings. Your wilder, wilful wanderer needs your sweet embrace. You have given your love indiscriminately to so many who have no recognition of its beauty, its power, its wonder and value. There is one vital key you have missed. This beautiful mortal body that you possess. She has missed you. She is hungry and thirsty and angry and afraid. Give that love to the one who can drink deep and eat heartily of its wonders.
She has waited so long. Been steadfast in her companionship.

We are space ships, as Anthony Gormley says, but we are multitudes.

Interstellar.
Internal.

Stop this quest for what is not yours. Take time in the darkness. Hear its song in the stillness. Know the love that will wrap its wings around you.
Embrace the dark. It takes time to settle and let your focus soften. The light will seep through those cracks. The shell that has encased your heart for so long needs to expand. Allow the light to touch your heart. Soften that wildness. Open the doors and windows.
​
Feel the breeze stir your spirit. Awaken the wild. It needs to clamber. Go and find the space you crave. Take the pirate on an adventure.

My meditation routine has intensified recently. A very early meditation this morning helped me feel energised. Something in me has shifted. After dancing around the kitchen while I waited for the kettle to boil I decided to close my morning pages after a brief paragraph and go into the sunshine.

​Oh BLISS.

It was completed when the wind blew a Tortoise shell butterfly along then proceded to tip up one of the gunnera leaves. No messing with that breeze!

I had noticed a few social media posts related to a creative full moon. Sounds good. I thought I could do with some of that. I have been adroit at avoiding my studio, the canvas, materials of all shapes and sizes and the agony of sitting alone with my brain in the vulnerable state of mush that grief imposes. This grief has triggered all kinds of old miseries that I pushed away without complete resolution. Until grief’s distress hit me I was busy, funtioning and productive. But not healed. So this time I am trying a new approach; putting two strong creative techniques together to create a third potent practice. Intuitive painting plus Light-Writing together with an intention to spawn change, to shape-shift: transformation, transmogrification.

​A rebirth is what I seek.

Not merely a change but an evolution. The crack between the two processes is where something happens, the smudge to evolve. Meditation has become an essential ingredient in the alchemy. A silence without incantation; wordless spells. I sit and try not to think.

My Dearest Darling makes the breakfast at the weekend. An Irish spread with scrambled eggs (he’s got this down to a fine art, he’s a perfectionist). Toast with bitter marmalade and coffee. He’s a coffee connoisseur. Fragrant freshly ground beans in a rich liquified extract (did I mention he’s a perfectionist?).

This weekend was that creative new moon in some sign or another. My desire for an original and inspired time was in the stars. I was hungry to find a productive outlet; to paint and write and find some peace beyond. Adventurously, the breakfast was Heston Blumenthal-ed. Somehow (I declined to ask for details), the coffee and the eggs entwined. He took an executive decision to continue to cook those eggs. It was Sunday. There were no more eggs in the house. They evolved into something between frog spawn and cat sick, but funny. Inedible but hilarious. Inventive and bravely inspired. Gross, but somehow just what I needed. It was refreshing and endearing to see my man’s human flaws.
​

Social media is usually a polished façade. It hides all the mess and confusion, the frayed edges and the ugly beginnings. I love posting images but social media is tireless. It devours hours of works in an instant, the gaping mouth calling for more posts, unsatisfied, insatiable. I am tired of the black hole, the void, into which my work falls. Once posted my painting feels used. With its image on the web it takes on a cloak of ‘done, been there, what’s next?’.

Once the gloom of an artist’s block envelopes you, perfectionism is the monster in the dark. The effort and the learning are disregarded. We all need to produce messy images. We need permission to engage with chaos and disorder. My brain is in turmoil. I need to honour my dis-ease. Judgement is anathema to creativity.

I need to produce messy images.

​I’m giving myself permission to engage with chaos and disorder and to find the joy within. 

I am so excited to continue my blog posts. It has been a while since I had time to sit and think or to tell my story here. I can’t contain myself now. I want to tell everyone about my exhibition of small paintings in Chocoa, a glamorous boutique coffee and chocolate Bistro in Ballymena. And my Cat painting was requested too!

​It is time I told a little of the Cat’s evolution. It has taken a decade to find this final cat shape.
The painting began life as part of my thinking process when I was embroiled in an academic venture exploring the alternative language art materials offer to access and to express complex feelings and emotions. The process of painting this was a bit like thinking out loud. It also slowed my thinking and made my confusion and puzzlement visible. I felt vulnerable and insignificant, like a very little fish in a vast unknown ocean.

​The fact that I had committed myself to the huge task hit me as I looked at the shapes and felt the terror of falling. I drew figures jumping from an aeroplane, a child engrossed in a book, feet taking slow steps forward (a tortoise found a form beneath the toes) and a face emerging from a labyrinth. Over time, as my work led me into strange new territory my interaction with the painting helped me to organise and to clarify my feelings and ideas, even to get inside my own head.  

​When the academic journey was complete the painting continued to change. Through it I was able to express my experience of the new directions my life was taking. At one point the red tree trunk became a crocodile. The little boy sitting on the platform became the reflection in his eye. During this time I painted lots of images of the crocodile-riding goddess Akhilanda.  She is the never-not-broken one. She taught me much about the value of our scars and how although we may feel broken we are always whole. My lessons absorbed I was able to paint over the intense colour and texture and to free myself from the anxieties and expectations of academia. I began to play lightly with shapes and patterns. Ducks and flowers and climbing figures covered the canvas.

​The painting sat quietly in my studio for a while as I found myself painting more and more again. One day I added a blue layer. It was a foundation for something but I waited until the image offered itself to me. I had begun to paint small animal portraits and a cat appeared that was simple yet dramatic. Here was the character to pull the whole canvas together. It still wasn’t quite ready to stop me though, until the koi carp appeared amongst the marigolds. The fish provided a visual tension. Like a pool you could now look at multiple layers; glimpses of the bottom, things swimming at various depths and reflections and refractions on the surface. I called it complete.

​Go and say hello in Chocoa. The hot chocolate is unbelievable wonderful. I can’t wait to try breakfast!

During the painting of 'Tortoise Man' a parrot popped up from a little pool of potent mud. He has led me on an exploration of parrots. When I get this far I can't resist finding out what the animal I have discovered/uncovered through layers of paint might really look like. I love this adventure stage although my inner critic screams constantly for photorealistic perfection. I am beginning to appreciate the critic and to allow the inner voice to to help rather than sabotage my efforts. It leads to lots of learning!

Joyful Painting with me at Midtown Makers Ballymena throughout October 2017

Thank you Patricia Perry for the wonderful photos and to all the Makers, the board of the Business Centre and the wonderful staff of Midtown Makers. The last picture shows how I feel! Yay! We did it!