I'm proud of myself for having completed each day's painting, on the past two days. A family campout with resultant lousy sleep (due to an airless air mattress) and then a return home to much storminess and tornado watches, kept me from posting those two days.
But I painted.
For these two days, I find myself leaning heavily toward accepting the paintings, just as they are. On Day 42, at first I was disappointed in how the aqua wash dulled the colors.
Yet a couple days later, I like the whole effect.
And still, I remember the original vividness, now forever silenced.
On Day 43, I painted when I was quite sleep-deprived, and twitchy due to storms all around, some in the physical atmosphere, and some in the region of my heart. With the first applications of paint to the page, I thought, "Phooey. This will obviously be the first day I just plain do not like the work at all. And maybe that is the lesson for this day."
With acceptance coming so early in that day's process, expectations leaked away. What could I do to hurt the painting, which was already a "lost cause?" So I just poked and plopped and swooshed paint, wherever I wanted.
Result? I liked the ending. No clue why. I just like it.
Almost every day I paint, the effort teaches me something about life and me. Just when I think I've dropped the labels of "good" and "bad," "failure" or "success," I find that I have evaluated once again. But the paintings are inviting me, pretty insistently, to DROP this response.
That's working pretty well with the painting.
Today, I'm trying it with me: just accept me as I am. Because I am.
3 comments:
I liked the top painting--probably because teal and purple is my top cool color combo just as orange and yellow is my top warm color combo.
When I looked at the pink and aqua one, the first things I "saw" were bacon strips!!
Isn't the point of this 100 day thing just to paint for 100 days??? I don't think liking and not liking are part of the deal. Nobody likes all the clothes in a store...different stuff for different tastes,
I think you are just supposed to create and just ignore whether you like it. Just paint...there's plenty more paper. Later on, after the 100 days, you can look back at all you did and then repeat what you did that you like and not repeat what you did that you don't like. You have to create now to have anything later to pick from. Hopefully I am making a little sense.
I didteal and purple today. Yesterday I did Elizabeth marching thru Japan!
Sharon--I am so eager to see some of your paintings!!
I'm pretty sure the roots of my "like/dislike" thing lie in the fact that I have had one father and one husband and both left. I could not make them stay. If I could have figured out how to be "good" maybe they would have "llked" me and stayed.
Those two men influenced pretty much all of my years on earth so far. But day by day, I am learning acceptance. I think I am working out a bunch of stuff in these daily paintings.
Oh, day 43 is awesome!! I love the more overall pattern effect--you used your whole "canvas" beautifully.
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