Painting into the Sacred Sound Current

 I am still navigating this oppressive fatigue. This winter it has been brutal, it feels like I am trudging  through a dark, underwater tunnel, filled with mud up to my knees.  The fatigue makes finding the energy to get into my studio incredibly hard but I have really been pushing myself because I think it is very healing for me to spend time painting.  I literally just put one foot in front of the other to haul my body up the stairs into the studio. My brain is usually screaming "I can't do this, I'm too tired"  so I don't preplan what I will paint. I hold not attachment to the results and I find that helps a lot. All I do is randomly pick colors, put gesso on multiple sheets of watercolor paper and have at it. Some of the sheets of paper will just become backgrounds for other layers and that non attachment helps things flow. After a while one painting usually ends up grabbing my attention and I switch my focus to that one until I run out of energy.

Cleaning up is the hardest part because by then what little energy I managed to scrounge up to paint has at that point been completely depleted so I try to keep things fairly tidy throughout the whole process. I keep a big bin of water in the sink and rinse out brushes, tools, stamps, etc... as I go. I also try to clean off the large plexiglass palette I use a few times during the process so I am not faced with a ton of dried on acrylics that must be scrubbed and scrapped off at the end.

The thing that I think helps me the most is that I play various chants and mantra music during my painting sessions. A few of my favorite mantra singers are Snatam Kaur, Ajeet Kaur, Simrit, Dave Stringer, Mirabai Ceiba, Krishna Das, Deva Premal, and many other Spirit Voyage artists. (Each artists name is a link to a video of their music on YouTube). The sound of these sacred chants helps lift my energy level just enough to channel my creative focus and allow me to create what ever images flow through me and onto the paper. I find these chants incredibly restful and healing on a very deep soul level. Chanting the many names of God restores and balances me in a way that allows my creativity to continue to flow, even if only for very short periods of time. This is proving to be an incredible blessing for me when I am not able to get out and socialize.

Here are a couple of abstracts I have done lately.