The Challenge this original blog was created for is long over. One day I may post the results. I have started another challenge. This time the daily commitment is to turn up at the page and let the mystery guide me. I have been drawing, but more recently have wanted to try my hand at animation. This is my second attempt. I am posting it here because wordpress is the only thing I can find that will post a large and long GIF. My tumblr blog won’t do it!
As you have no doubt noticed, I stopped blogging for the middle third of my challenge journey. A lot has been happening. Some of it productive and some counter-productive.
On the productive side I worked on my painting, completed it, put it in the exhibition (it is still up).
Today I had a sudden urge to return here and share the result. It has been an automatic response for me to cringe when my work is on public display. I love making it so much and yet the sharing of it is excruciating. I am determined to move on from this as I know it doesn’t serve me.
First I shared it in the intimate and supportive facebook group set up for the challenge, then in the exhibition, now here. It feels a bit like symbolically opening myself up to the world. An important ritual at this stage of the challenge.
So here is the painting, plus some photos showing details. Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 24″. It is called ‘She speaks for the trees because the trees have no tongues’. A portrait of a local environmental warrior, Sarah Rees, who fights for the forest full time and has recently been part of a campaign to protect the remaining habitat of the Leadbeater’s Possum.
I am learning to relax a bit with charcoal sketching. This is very rough, but incorporates some of the elements I would like to have in the image. I want the painting to feel organic, damp and fertile like the rich wet forests of the central highlands. It may have some creatures. I decided to try putting some in it. My subject is even less recognizable here!
Today I spent a skype hour with my beautiful coach Claire. Wow. We did a completion exercise on my life as a mother raising children. Now that my baby is 16 and rapidly becoming her own person, it really does feel like a new phase in my life. Time to create something new. So I have spent the day recognizing and owning my creation, the life I have now and all that it holds.
The good ship ‘kirstydivesdeep’ appears to have taken a detour. I am going to have a go at a portrait for the ‘Visage’ exhibition in September. Entries due by Friday 2nd. Haven’t got a lot of time, but just have to do it.
A while ago I took some reference photos and today I did a very rough sketch to get a feel for the image. Have to start somewhere. I will paint it in acrylics on canvas I think. I am following the urge to do this painting because that’s where the ‘juice’ is right now.
Because the canvas is quite big (24 x 36 inch) I have done the sketch on an A2 page. This feels really weird. I am so used to drawing smaller than that.
Anyway it is very rough and ready, but here it is. Doesn’t look much like her yet. It’s interesting how there are certain things that need to be in a portrait and it will look exactly like the person. Sometimes they are indefinable things.
I plan to include other elements in this painting, and to experiment with the idea of a detailed face and hands, with the rest of the image falling away into something else.
Spatial, all emotions expressed through laughter, oblivious to detail, loves the spotlight. Diva.
Lioness, badger, mountain stream, oak tree, acorn, sunflower
Negredo – crab
Albedo – dove
Rubedo – balancing with grace
Diminutive, determined, easily underestimated. Imaginative, daring, certain. Can feel lost in a noisy, pushy world.
Impala, night bird singing, wren. Beech tree in winter.
Negredo – mouse
Albedo – hawk
Rubedo – flying from the nest
My first 120 Day Challenge was clearly defined. A drawing is a drawing and either I did it or I didn’t.
This time I have committed to take action towards an end result every day and to ‘tune in’ intuitively to what the next step is. This is proving to be far more difficult. Firstly, my end result involves a public display of my work, something I often resist. Secondly, as I am generally relying on my own intuition it is bringing up self-doubt. I am trained in the intuitive process and can almost always give accurate and useful information to others, but I have discovered that I don’t really trust what I get for myself. I know what a sneaky thing the mind can be, and for me trust is a biggie, of myself or others. The result … doubt doubt doubt. Writing this blog has its own challenges. I fluctuate between really valuing the sharing and the clarity that writing about it brings and deep embarrassment about how boring I am being. Yesterday (Day 35) for the first time in two challenges, I ‘couldn’t’ do it.
The structure I am using to approach this challenge comes from what I have learned from a year-long training with an organization called ‘The Magician’s Way’. This incorporated the brilliant work of Robert Fritz as well as the principles of Alchemy and some of the ideas of Shamanism. Although it sounds esoteric and complex the fundamentals are very simple. The work is based on a premise that we can experience life from two different perspectives or orientations. One is ‘egoic’, driven by our thoughts and feelings and our beliefs about what they mean. I sometimes refer to it in this blog as the ‘identity’. The other is creative, also referred to here as the ‘heart’. Put very simply, the identity goes round and round in circles forever trying to resolve itself, and never will. The heart moves directly and naturally towards what it loves. Art resonates with others when it comes from the heart. From this orientation we are all connected, beautifully synergistically woven together into the miracle we call life.
This blog is about being real. I know lots of people who have participated in the ‘Magician’s Way’ training and in their own ways are incorporating what they learnt from it into their lives. They live all over the world. I want to share with them, and anyone else who is interested, the day-to-day negotiation of all that I am, in service to something that I want to create from my heart.
I am writing this post to give some background and clarity to anyone reading this blog. Most of the drawings, including this one, are from my first challenge.
Pollyanna Darling, the creator of the 120 Day Do What You Love Challenge, will be doing a super charging session with me soon. This will give me some clearer insight into my heart’s desire around this project. Intuition is even more powerful when we use it in service to each other.
On Thursday Alice and I returned to the NGV for a second visit to the Vienna – Art and Design exhibition. As well as this I packed the day so full of things, moving stuff out of storage, loading and unloading the car, 6 hours on the road driving, a shoot on the other side of town, that I had no energy to write about it. Catching up now.
At ‘Vienna’ I am mostly interested in the paintings. Especially Schiele. I love the loose, confident, slightly crazed feel to his work. Alice also loves his stuff. He was another Saturn return casualty, dying from the Spanish Flu at 28.
We also got some white ink which Alice needs for her art.
Two steps taken towards my end result – inspiration and materials. Crammed my day full of ‘more important’ things so didn’t get time to draw or blog. This despite the fact that it was supposed to be art day.
I love the idea of detailed hands and face with a different treatment for the rest of the portrait. Schiele did it with a rough sketch, Klimt with decorative pattern. There is a version of this idea brewing in my imaginings.
Manages things best at an even, steady pace. Under stress, tends towards silence. Not easily swayed. Light-hearted wit with a touch of cynicism. Philosopher, poet, dreamer. Sensitive to bullshit and impatient with it. Began a search for self-knowledge earlier than most. Wishes she was more reckless. Much loved by her Mum (yes, that is a big hint).
Banksia, white fox, magical, cold flame.
Negredo – serpent
Albedo – Falcor, dragonfly
Rubedo – the empty space inside a whirlpool of water, the eye of the storm
Day 32, which was yesterday … I helped young Bec with her photo shoot and then took some reference shots of four of the people there. Got a couple of questionnaires answered too. I was so tired by the time I got home that I fell asleep almost the moment I sat down. Didn’t even make it to bed!
