Saturday, July 11, 2009

Day 41 of 100

Today's time painting was pure joy. The first swoosh of color onto the page made me catch my breath. I knew right away that "just" doing this one painting would not be enough today, so I opened up my 6x18 art journal. Its professional grade paper took the paint in a wholly different way, and I had fun playing between the two.


Today was simply the joy of color and shape. I finished the piece early in the morning, and then loved walking past it all throughout the rest of the day. Sometimes it looked like a very happy and vibrant Native American blanket. I wanted it on my bed!





Before I went to bed last night, I prayed and thought much about accepting myself just as I am, just as God made me. Not so much as a particular human in a particular situation, but more as a spiritual idea, the beloved child of a loving God. I prayed to give my hands and heart to God and let Him use me to glorify Him.


This is not a new prayer for me, but I just held it very close last night. Talked with and emailed a couple other artists and shared what I could to encourage them to release, as much as possible, a habit of criticizing ourselves and of setting things up so that we always fall short of our impossible goals.



So, I fell asleep with surrender to God, the great Creator, the great Artist, on my lips. No wonder that I woke up ready to paint such joy.

P.S. Day 34 I tried something different and had been curious to see what you all thought of it. As it turned out, that was a day with no comments (4th of July!!). If anybody has time to check it out and give me their opinion, I'd appreciate it. But I thoroughly understand if you can't. :)

6 comments:

sharon said...

my favorite colors again--yea-a-a! I like the joy of these colors. How can you turn this into a bedspread??

aquamaureen said...

I wish I knew how I COULD make it into a blanket, Sharon. Wouldn't sleep be sweet, under such beauty?

Rowena said...

I looked at july 4th and came back here and looked at this one, and I'm going to say it again, Matisse and Mondrian.

You did it here, too, with the close ups. What if you painted larger geometric shapes on the page...

sharon said...

Jim's mom painted by numbers and made a huge bedspread of the 50 states and trees and capitols. Can't you paint a large spread?

aquamaureen said...

Sharon and Rowena, I've mentioned before how much comments help and encourage me. But I'll repeat myself and thank you both for taking time not only to visit my blog, but also to leave me comments. They mean more than mere words can say.

Amanda Fall - Sprout editor said...

Now that's some eye-popping color! Love it!!