Mary Hardy just sent me a few photos from MS Colony Banquet Night & I posted them here: http://harryally.com/ms_art_colony/patt_odom_banquet_night.html
We were all supposed to wear creative hats and Annette thought of wearing "Stick on Head" - how apropos for Harry's "students" to put sticks on their heads - brilliant! The idea took off & suddenly stick head hats were all the rage. Haha. So you gotta see me with the stick on heads.
MS Colony aka "MAC" is still brewing on my mind. There are many artists we met there who lost their homes in Katrina and they are still working at recovering financially & emotionally. I feel like I can see the depths of that experience in their paintings. Such tender bittersweet beauty seems to only emerge out of suffering. I can't find words here, just a deep vibration remains and I hold them dear in that cache inside me.
Annette & I talk about how can we get a Colony experience for Troy? Maybe we can just invite our MS artist friends to come up for a visit & paint in the park? We can cook stone soup for dinner. Harry & I have room for two to sleep in our basement room. hmmm.
Since I began this blog to write about painting a year ago - OH, wait! It is the anniversary of my first blog post! WOOT! - Yahoo! Hippo Birdie to My Blog!
Anyway I will tell about my painting since Colony.
As I mentioned in previous blog post, I discovered a different way of applying the texture paint. After several days of painting, some other benefits have emerged. I have become un-wedged from the practice of using heavy applications of texture. It is hard to tell if it is the act of un-wedging or the technique that has caused a change in energy flow. Both? I don't seem to get stuck at points here & there causing energy to stagnate in the studio. This sounds so BS-y but is very real. Because the energy flow has less snag-ups, my idea-feelings remain more connected with the materials & the flow of energy is almost a dance.
Because I am painting about a feeling, it is imperative to maintain that feeling. But feelings are like water. How do you contain them? And I learned one very important thing from making garden ponds with waterfalls - they stagnate if you don't keep them moving. So I created a sort of feeling pond/waterfall in my studio.
As you know I also write stuff & right now I have several songs underway. So I have the music to the songs recorded on a CD that loops while I paint. I flow from painting to writing a bit of words then back to the paint again. As I build paint, I build words, the music continues to move & recirculate, containing the feelings, but pumping air thru them and keeping them moving & fresh.
There is also a confidence I brought home with me from Colony. Again a very subtle thing. It was not anything any one person said. It is something that comes from standing in a place painting with other artists. You are all there for one purpose - to paint. It is what you do. You wake up, eat your breakfast and paint. You don't worry about if a gallery will like your stuff. You just paint. You don't worry if your shirt matches your hair ribbon, you just paint. You would feel really dumb standing in the middle of the pavilion @ Colony and wondering if you should go weed your garden or paint. No, you just paint. So the thought weeds got hacked for me. The should weeds. The doubt me weeds. Just paint!
I wanted to post photos of all the paintings I've been working on, but alas it is raining today.
Naptime then I'm going to paint!
xo