Back to work on Roxy after a much needed day off, which gave me time to understand the emotional story of this picture .... Hail and Farewell ... saying goodbye, honoring the past, and embracing change.
One of the most important teachers in my life is Janet Sussman. Decades ago she taught me to meditate, for a start ... and lots of other techniques from the world of weird ... healing mostly, but also metaphysics. She knew I was destined to be an artist long before I did.
Janet always said that the hardest thing we have to do in a lifetime is learn to let go of someone we love. Usually it's a person we've lost, but letting go of anything we love is horrible. She teaches how to separate oneself from the attachment and hold on to the love. That the love comes not from the one we've lost, but from within ourselves. When the person, or dog, is gone, the love they activated within us remains, and nothing can ever change that. So that's what this painting is about. When composing it, I could feel something distant and wonderful: letting go of some old pain, and recreating it in a new way... holding on to the fire of love and rebuilding ... beauty for ashes. Of course, I had no experience of those words until I stepped away for a bit.
Red is the color of the here and now ... of idea manifesting in matter. The red opening behind Roxy, rather than being a point of departure, represents a gateway for change ... for love to reshape and reassert itself even within the sadness. After the figure is further along, the PLAN is to have objects (probably flowers and plants mostly) flowing around her and through the opening ... hopefully conveying how porous the gate is, in both directions ... and how the love we feel is all that was ever really real anyway. Well ... that's the plan ... sure hope I can pull it off. But at a bare minimum, I want to make a beautiful painting, and thankfully, I've probably got the horses for that.
