My aim is to create a bowl full of joy
        Clear as the sky,
        Pure as falling cherry petals,
Without worry, without doubt;
Then comes full energy, endless power
        And the road to art.

Chiura Obata

(November 18, 1885–October 6, 1975)

 

This morning has been full of art, made within the luxury of solitude and a few stimulating email exchanges. One reply was a rejection of further doomy/gloom world news; am so overloaded. Another was a long overdue reply to a request for themed sketching suggestions.

To the first, I included three photos, recently re-discovered, that share the same theme. Taken months apart, each one was separately inspired by  the beauty I wake up to, live with daily, and go home to at night. 

 

THIS is what I want to maintain focus on, to keep life balanced:

Dawn. Day. Dusk.

 

 

 

Life isn't always well-balanced.  There are times when something happens to suddenly break a peaceful heart.  During one of those times, an inspired photo captured a symbolic 'Selfie'.

 

The photo came to mind this morning, with the second email needing a reply.  Not as a recommendation to make depressed sketches, but to consider objects as representative of who we are; a Selfie portrait without physically being in it.  

 

Why did I consider this a possible theme worth sketching?  Because it stretches imaginations as well as being therapeutic.  The first photo, below, was taken during a time of questioning the value  of my Art Saturdays. It gave relief, allowing painful thoughts and feelings to find a place outside my body.  It was enough...until this morning. 

 

Sketching is different than taking a photograph, skillfully done or not.  Yes, there are ways to creatively enhance, or even be highly creatively altering it.  Am not disparaging those works that are the results.  I have a good friend who does fantastic things with her edited photographs--she makes wildly stimulating, beautiful new art with them.

 

So, thinking both of her and my own suggestion for the sketchers, I tossed all plans otherwise for this morning (now edging dangerously into afternoon's tasks) and played with the original portrait image using tools in iPhoto. Three attempts were made to enhance the severity of how gloomy life had seemed at the time; I was dead flowers, drooping from a vase cast with the worried face of a woman famed in Spain for her care of children in need.  My own efforts were insignificant beside hers, was not comparing anything but the enormity; the need for fostering childhood joy, is everywhere.

 

 

The exercise (and now, crafting this post) has been terrifically reaffirming, the benefit which is ultimately healing.  At some point I will return to these photos and transform them once more, by hand, with pen, brushes, paper and pigments.  I can then craft the image without the distraction of the stainless thermos from where the vase hangs.  Am looking forward to it, and can now appreciate and share more of the successes there are with the Saturday Art students, their Beach Cleanup Project, which more of will be shared in another  post:

 

AREN'T THESE KIDS FANTASTIC!?

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