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.

Transcendence through Painting

Pain softens my hard edges and forces me to slow down. It grounds me and teaches me compassion. Today I am sending loving kindness out to all sentient beings that are suffering from physical, mental or spiritual pain.

Yesterday I got caught up in the painting again, I seem to enter into a trance when I am working on it and I don’t snap out of it until many hours later when my pain level is through the roof. Don has asked me every morning not to work on the painting until after my pain resolves, and he is right, but I get into the studio and the painting takes over, I just can’t seem to stop. Yesterday I went into the studio in the morning before breakfast and when the pain became strong enough to break the trance I decided to stop for a breakfast break, when I looked at the clock however it was 3:00 in the afternoon. I was stunned!

I stopped and made a bowl of millet & rice cereal with blueberries and went right back into the studio. At 5:30 Don arrived home to find me still at the easel a half eaten bowl of cereal on my drafting table and me barely able to stand but in an very transcendent blissful state. I knew I needed to stop at that point but I was “in the zone” a sort of manic painting state that was just too rich to end. I was in so much pain towards the end I was actual praying “God please help me stop, I know I need to stop, for the sake of my body help me stop”. The spell was finally broken by pain and fatigue and low blood sugar from not eating so I stopped. Don could see how much pain I was in and instead of yelling at me about it he helped me clean my brushes. Thank God he understands the place you go as an artist when you are graced with flow, he is so wonderful!

It is fascinating to wake up from these creative trances for the last few days, at first the landing back into my body and real time awareness is a bumpy ride. There is the pain and fatigue along with the sudden awareness of being back in my body and it is very anxiety provoking. Each day I have done some gentle yoga stretches to untangle the knots and then I do some meditation to get comfortable with the sensations of my body. I put ice packs from my neck down to my tail bone and chanted Ohm for about half an hour and got blissed out on just being a witness to the flow of feelings that were running through me like a river. There was the leftover trance like numbness still left in my body from painting, my senses were so heightened and I was seeing color, shading and contrast in everything I looked at as if the whole world were a painting. Then there was the darker side with the pain, fatigue and anxiety that were trying to creep back in. I just sat and smiled with all of it, thinking I wonder if this is anything like the awareness inducing acid trips Ram Das and Timothy Leary took back in the 60’s.

Today the pain is bad enough that I will not be going in and working on the painting, I already tried early this morning but it was crazy to even try, I want to be good to my body and let it heal and settle a bit. I am going to do some yoga stretches and meditation, run some errands with Don and have my weekly Friday lunch with my friend Susan here at the house. Today I am also acutely aware of how in the past pain and illness have caused me great anxiety, depression and suffering. Today I am lifting up all of those that are in pain of any kind, I am opening my heart to them and sending them compassion, deep love and a balm for their woundedness.

Fierce Grace

Watched the Ram Das movie "Fierce Grace" yesterday and was inspired to tears. Lots of healing cleansing tears, what a gift. Grace landed that movie in my lap exactly when I needed to see it. I came away with the timely lesson that suffering comes when you try to hold onto continuity and although pain is a worthy adversary to the spiritual practice, today I choose not to struggle against, but to be present as a witness for whatever this day brings.


I tried working on the painting a little today but my pain level is just too high. I managed to enlarge and reshape the eyes and mouth a little but did not get very far. In the next day or two as things improve I may start on some smaller projects until this relapse subsides, at least if I am involved in a small project I wont be as tempted to keep going back to the painting and flaring my pain up again.

The Murky Depths

Yesterday I said I felt like I was at low tide and today I feel like I have sunk to the murky depths. I worked on the painting all day yesterday and my pain level ended up getting so bad I had to stop. It has been escalating for a couple of days and I am sure it is from increasing the meds again. I had a horrible night last tight and my anxiety level is also at an all time high (which has also happed when I have increased the meds before). So for now I need to stop working and rest my body until this Herxheimer reaction from increasing the meds calms down a bit.

Today I am going to do my mediation practice and some gentle yoga stretches to see if that helps settle things a bit. If things don’t calm down in a few days I will decrease the medications again.


I will post a photo of the face since that is all I really worked on yesterday.

Low Tide

I feel like I am at low tide today, lots of fatigue and pain. I was supposed to increase my Lyme meds back in November but I wanted to wait until January so that I would not be having a dye off reaction and feel sick for the holidays. I finally increased them a few days ago and let's just say I am very glad I waited! My Fatigue has come crashing back and I feel pretty crappy but it's all part of the healing journey, even the dreaded Herxheimer reactions!!

Went to church yesterday and shopping afterwards, by the time I got back here I was way to fatigued to go into the studio to do any work. I brought up the idea of doing a Full Moon Creativity Circle with a friend at church and she liked the idea so I think I will try to get a small group together and we will do some soulful creative exploration each month on the full moon.

Shaman's Journey Dyes on Silk

Positive Omens For 2010

There are signs of regeneration and renewal in the studio these days as a very confused dahlia is now in full bloom. Last summer we apparently forgot one of the dahlia tubers in the basement and we found it in the fall when we stowed away the ones we dug from the garden. In October I planted it in a pot and waited to see if it would come back to life and soon after I planted it small green shoots began to appear. It grew rapidly throughout the fall and after the Solstice when the days began to grow longer a tightly closed bud that had formed slowly began to open.

My self portrait is also beginning to bloom. After looking pretty sickly for a few days with only the under painting done, yesterday I began to paint in the next layer which I think is called the dead layer. I worked only on her face and learned a lot in the process about what I can and cannot do with the oil paints and how different they are than the dyes I am used to working with on silk. The dead layer is not terribly exciting but it certainly looks better than the first layer did with only the shadows painted in! Now she is like a bud beginning to open, not a fully opened blossom yet but the potential of her beauty is beginning to show.

Now the New Year is here, my studio has been thoroughly cleaned and rearranged (I found a lucky clover in the process), my confused dahlia has been resurrected, I am working with a new Dr in Southern Mass and am having very positive results with the new treatment I am on and I am finally taking the time to work on a painting that that I have wanted to do for years but never took the time to do it. I am surrounded by positive omens proclaiming that 2010 is shaping up to be a very good year!

Four Leaf Clover on New Year’s Day

(Click on photos to enlarge)

Yesterday I spent the entire day reorganizing my studio. I tore everything apart and did a lot of rearranging. While I was in the tearing apart mode I came across a four leaf clover I had found on a walk last year. I remember it well because it was the first four leaf clover I have ever found so I was pretty excited about it. What a great omen to find this symbol of good luck on the first day of the new year as I was cleaning out the old and issuing in the new in the sacred space of my studio. I also made a little alter space in my studio, which is something I had in my old, much larger studio but had not found room for in this studio yet. (Forgot to take a photo of my mini alter after I made it, will do that later)

As I was cleaning out my studio my spooky looking under-painted self portrait (which was still drying) was staring at me all day and often in the way. I moved it around gruffly as I worked and went through a bunch of different emotions as I looked at it throughout the day. At one point I got very anxious and wondered why in the world I did not do a more primitive portrait, this realism is way beyond my knowledge and ability as an artist at this point. I felt panicky that I had spent all this time on it and that it would be wasted time, that it would come out terrible and I would hate it. At other times I was really pissed off at it. I was angry that it was in my way all day, that it was so ugly with its sickly looking coat of grey/green under paint and that it was staring at me with that intense gaze. I was mad that it was hard, not easy and all fun.

Finally at one point when I sat down to rest my aching back and neck I had the revelation that I was missing the point. I am doing this as a soulful expressive art experience, it doesn’t matter how it comes out. Entering into the process of painting it, just showing up in front of the canvas and allowing it to be birthed out of me is all I need to do. It is the creation experience itself I am after, not the product produced at the end. So that helped re-center me in this project and I am ready to enter into a dialog with this painting again today in my freshly organized studio, complete with an alter space and my lucky four leaf clover. Happy second day!