Broken Brushes, Healing & Dreams

Since I am a silk painter and am only experimenting with oil paints I have been using really cheap brushes on this self portrait I am working on. Last week two of them broke a day apart from each other so I went to Zephyr Designs to buy some brushes. I still didn’t go for the expensive ones because I am not sure where this oil painting experiment is going. I also ordered an easel and tilting painters stool online from Dick Blick that I hope will help me deal with the pain flares that I am getting when I am working on this painting. Unfortunately the easel is on back order until February 15.

I love buying art supplies and need to rein myself in because I could easily overdo it and get lost in the thrill of buying new “toys” to play with. So when I got home I pulled my shiny new brushes out of the bag I laid them out on the table in the studio next to the broken ones. I was looking at the broken brushes thinking I may use them in a collage, after all they served me well, up until they reached their breaking point and snapped. They both broke in the same area but in totally different ways, on one the wood handle broke and on the other the metal part broke. I started to think about my weak spots and what my breaking points were and it wasn’t a difficult exercise to come up with a list of things relatively quickly. The onset of my illness 9 years ago was a huge breaking point for me and now that I am finally reaching periods of remission, and even a promise of possible healing, I am reminded of how my inner demons affected the people that were in contact with me over the years when I was so ill. How many of them, through my own suffering , did I push to the breaking point? So I think I will make a collage called “Breaking Point” in an effort to send healing energy out into the Universe to undo some of the damage I did to those I have hurt in the past. Maybe as my own wounds are healed the wounds I have inflicted on others will also be healed.

All of this reminded me that I am really feeling blessed by this economic slowdown (It took a year of freaking out and fighting it before I reached this conclusion). If my painting and print sales were still as high as they were a couple of years ago I would still be pushing myself further and further away from the more soulful/reflective work that I have been desiring to do for years. I have noticed that since I have taken a break from producing work specifically to sell I am having more artistic visions and dreams, like the breaking point collage idea stemming from the broken brushes. The night before last I had a dream with a strong visual in it and I sketched it out with markers. It is the silhouette of a strange duck headed figure sitting by a pool with a red sky, trees and full moon reflected in the pool. I haven’t tried to analyze it, I am just allowing it to be birthed. I think I will also try playing around with this image in oils and see what evolves as I receive the gifts this slowdown in sales has given to me.