Allspice & Acrylics: Seasons, transitions, and glitter, and glue-gunning :)

Welcome to the week, folks!

The sun is starting to come out, thank goodness for that extra hour of daylight, and let's make the most of it!

"Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you." - Walt Whitman

"Breath" by Me :)

And then there's always...

"A day without sunshine is like, you know, night." Steve Martin

In the studio...

I've got to start wrapping these sessions up but when I'm on a roll...I spent five hours on one painting! I used to turn out art by the minute like it was water, so a part of me doesn't feel "productive" enough...but then I remember, wait, this is about process, not product - it's not like anyone's commissioning me or anything! (However, I am open to that!)

My freshly organized studio!

I went to Lowe's yesterday and raided all of the little gadgets and such - I got so many ideas! Little screws, nuts, bolts, hooks...I'm very into repurposing things now. I also got some great tiles, wooden panels and plexiglass. I was trying to think of more innovative ways to mount my art and thought it might be nice to mount some inchies or a small series of canvas on glass to look like a window frame of sorts.

Awesome samples - free material - sweet!

So I decided to use this very textured background I had created a few days ago.

And looking through that beautiful book of trees gave me plenty of inspiration. These are the trees that inspired what I painted today:

From "Remarkable Trees of the World"

I really tried to get a feel for how the trees were communicating. Part of me felt like they were overly attached or having an intimate moment, and part of me felt like they were conflicted in which direction they wanted to go - like this was a pivotal moment in their relationship, in time, something with transition, and they were trying to figure out how much to trust their own path versus how much to go along the path of life together...so I started to outline them in gesso:

A bit different from the photo, but I felt more distance between the two trees - some kind of internal conflict for each.

And this was five hours later...

I decided that a powerful source of "conflict" is just the natural stages of transitions - it's hard to move on, and I think the seasons are a powerful metaphor for that. Yet, trees seem to do that so gracefully, hard as it may be.

As I've done quite a few paintings of this yet-to-be-named tree couple, they go back and forth between who is the more melancholy, who is joyous, the optimist, the solemn, who needs who more...

This time I had my woman tree looking longingly and a bit saddened or shocked by the man tree's desire to follow his own season's path:

It's a busy piece, but there are a lot of nuances that I'm proud of. I'm curious to see what my trees will tell me next...

I don't know why I made a Spring Tree and an Autumn Tree in transition - Maybe it's my attempt to pretend that winter doesn't exist! (Good luck with that in New England!) Or maybe the sadness I sense from the Spring Tree Woman is that Winter is coming between her and the Autumn Tree...painting three of them might be an interesting idea - I'll need a way bigger canvas though!

These are my other transitional paintings about the seasons...my new one will fit in quite interesting here.

Winter Meetings

End of Summer

Oh transitions...
I must say, my trees have grown up and evolved, just as trees do, and I do as well. Sometimes this past decade feels like a whirlwind, where I was jolted from one stage to the next: high school senior, {COMA} going back to feeling like an infant in the hospital, then rapidly having to find maturity and acceptance as I became a kind of "medical marionette" throughout 27 surgeries.

Spring!

I was childlike in being very unfamiliar to the outside "real world" and yet wise beyond my years with what I had to undergo, manage and deal with. Finding a way to create my own education and step into my own maturity and adulthood, yet feeling like a kid the entire time, still trying to wrap my brain around how I fit into this big old world when I was suddenly thrust out of it at 18.

Winter brrr...

Starting college at 26 and saying goodbye to older parts of my life - my childhood, even some of the medical nuisances...clearing room for new memories as I chose to accept, forgive, and move on.

Summer

Finding my way gradually, then suddenly meeting Brandon in March 2013, and extremely accelerating the process and transitions that "womanhood" entails as I get ready for our June 2015 wedding!

Fall at Hampshire College

Transitions are a tricky thing - they can be sudden, gradual, prompted, controlled, or involuntary and just the natural flow of life. I think the trick is that you have to allow yourself to move through them - even if it's not as gracefully as trees seem to manage.

A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it.

Nikki Giovanni