 |
| Cauldron |
Exactly one week ago my daughter walked away from a major car accident with bruises instead of broken limbs, paralysis, loss of sight or permanent brain damage. She was heading home, happy and smiling from spending time with her horse. A deer jumped out of the woods and landed directed in front of her car. The steep embankment to her right swallowed up her car like a giant jaw as trees crunched down on metal and glass when she swerved to avoid hitting the hapless animal. Only one small space in her car survived the impact. A space that turned out to be a womb of safety amid total destruction. Days later we stood in silent shock looking at her vehicle in the towing lot . . . Most of what remained was a mass of shiny, bright red metal crumpled up like discarded paper. I looked at the car with it’s waves of distorted and shattered glass, and I looked at my lovely daughter with a good amount of disbelief. She was certainly beat up, and bruised, but intact.
The emotions that have flowed through me over the course of the week have shown up as a tangled mess of gratitude, anger, fear, and joy knit together with incredulity. I’ve experienced an almost constant undertow of emotional discomfort that I find curious in light of the fact that my daughter not only survived, but survived in one piece. My disbelief has been playing with me like a naughty imp distorting the usual accuracy of my senses. Even with the physical evidence of her well being directly in front of me, I have experienced terrifying flourishes from the hand of that tiny rogue writing tragic hallucinations on the script of the moment. My senses challenged, acceptance and letting go a mirage in the distance while the image of her huddled on the side of the road shaking convulsively surrounded by parts of her car, is vividly clear.
I know the healthy path is to acknowledge the reality of what happened just one week ago, accept it and move on. To continually rehearse the possibilities of what could have happened past a certain point is an unhealthy practice. I know this, and the simple knowing of it doesn’t equate with the doing. We human beings need a space unique to our individuality to grieve and heal through a trauma. The real mark of maturity in development is to know what you need in your space, when the remembering is productive, and when it’s time to let go, and get your show off rehearsal and on the stage. In the process of creating art I have come across this very challenge.
It takes a level of development as an artist to know when the time and action of a work is complete . . . When it’s time to let go of a piece, declare it finished, and resist over-working. A painting grows through an emotional process where the vision I am carrying for the work meets with the material of paint, scrapers, brushes, and canvas. At times a section of the canvas disturbs and agitates me much like the trauma of the possibilities surrounding the car accident disturbed and agitated me. Many times I need to work with that section by washing it out, and recreating it in order for it to relate to the whole of the piece. I don’t stop working on a painting until that moment when I hear the sweet silence of completion whisper through my thoughts and into my hands that it is finished. At that point I leave my studio and walk away from the painting. Generally I don’t view it again for a day or so. This is how I separate, or let go, and sever the connection between us. For me, a vital and important part of the process of doing art . . . I put my heart and soul into my work and I let it go. Without this letting go I am tied to that which resides in the past and would be unable to go forward with the body and thrust of my work.
In the past week I’ve crawled deep inside with my emotions, with the images and speculations of what I might have been doing had that small womb of space not held my daughter safely through the impact that destroyed all but her. I’ve not been able to pull words out of my soul until I worked with this thing just as I work with the paintings yet to come, the paintings I am gestating throughout all the events of my life. It’s my way as a mother, as a woman, an artist, a thoughtful creator.
I come away from the week with a new respect for life, for myself and the work that I have chosen and been chosen for, the work of artistic creation. It’s never been what I would call easy and it is the thing in this life that I can invest in with my entire being. There is no definitive line between my life and my work, they flow together as waters traveling the same river. I cannot grasp the great depth of the matters of life/death, and what happens before/after. I can grasp what it means for me to live through these moments and give to them what is mine to give . . . My heart & soul in created works of art articulated in paint on canvas and words on a page.
That’s what this artist is thinking about today . . .
About the painting . . . Cauldron is my tribute to the complexities involved in working through the those life events that pull at my heart and keep me awake at night.