Meditation on Rain

A section of one of the Morning Meditation Paintings (No. 10)

I was in the middle of meditating (after waking up way too early) when the rain began to come down so powerfully hard and loud. I had just been in that place within me where I often find myself… surrounded by the landscape yet above the landscape, unfettered by gravity, rising above but somehow merged with the whole of oneness energy. A peaceful, whole, safe, oneness.

Then it began to pour and I had a momentary question that arose… of being with the sound of the rain or going back to where I was. The answer was, the sound is the now, in this moment. The earlier moments were in that oneness but now the whole was in the sound. The sound as a sound without meaning or expectation. Can I separate the sound of the rain from my years of understanding of what that sound means? Can I separate the sound from the visuals I carry of what is happening outside the room’s French doors… on the deck? On the roof? Am I able to just be with the sound without the anticipation of the raindrops to come immediately after this very moment of sound? And the next? Am I able to experience this moment without my knowledge of what rain is, the benefits of what it can do for the earth, and separate from my personal history with rain?

There was nothing to think of, to understand, to know about the rain except… In this moment it just is! Then the breath, the movement of my abdomen, and the sound of the rain merged into the moment.  The sound was no longer separate but part of the whole of the now. Then an awareness of the feeling of the cloth from my shirt on my belly, at the furthest point of the outbreath, became part of the mix.

You may be interested in reading about the Morning Meditation Paintings.

The Explorations Mini Series

“Explorations” mini series, paintings on paper.

I began a new mini series on the first day of April… the “Explorations series.” This group of small paintings was inspired because of spring cleaning. After spending time clearing out my parent’s home, I came back to my house and immediately began to clean out drawers and cabinets.

One cabinet was filled with magazines. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out a magazine. There must have been somewhere around 70 magazines in that cabinet. Many of them had been cut up and used when my daughter was younger, for collages and creative projects. It was time for that pile to go. They’ve been taking up space for years. But first I wanted to flip through the pages of each magazine… and as I did so, I was inspired to create one more project with them.

“Explorations” series in process.

I began pulling out any page with an image or part of an image that I found interesting. The magazines went into the recycle bin and I ended up with a fairly good sized pile of pages to consider using in some way. Before I knew it, I had glued one or more pieces of an image onto eight 6” x 6” sheets of canvas paper. They were ready to be painted.

The Goal: for the attached magazine image to inspire and challenge me to create something new each day. The “Explorations” give me an opportunity to shake things up, experience a personal art exercise. and see where it might lead.

“Explorations #12” 6” x 6” mixed media on paper.

My original intention was to complete ten of these and then decide if I wanted to continue. But the day I posted the first one, I decided to join the 100 day project on Instagram and made a commitment to create 25 in the series.

Posts for the 100 day project and the “Explorations” can be found and followed on Instagram and on my Facebook artist page.

In the next blog-post, I will share more about the project.

Asemic Writing

I loved creating this work on paper! When I produced this piece a couple of months ago, I felt like I had stumbled onto a wonderfully exciting creative adventure. I guess I was finally giving myself permission to explore an idea I’ve been wanting to play with for quite awhile. The idea was to include non-specific text in my artwork… to write without words. I’ve wanted to create the illusion of text without any specific meaning and then I learned it had a name: asemic writing.

According to Wikipedia and referenced on a number of other sites, asemic means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning."

The use of asemic writing seems to be a natural progression for me after incorporating ancient languages into my paintings over the past few years. This is my first creative experience with asemic writing but definitively not my last. I am looking forward to exploring this further.

“We are all Connected” 6” x 9” mixed media on paper