I realized, painting this piece yesterday, how much my need to name, identify, and categorize drives my painting. At first I allow my brush to travel at will, with colors moving onto the canvas as the mood strikes me. But at some point the urge to control kicks in, and I find myself looking at the work and saying, "What is that? Where is this going? What are we conveying here?" With this one it happened after those two big swirls of white/yellow went in; there was this sense of, "Oh, no, that doesn't look like anything recognizable. Now what?"It's amazing how much courage it takes to just let it be what it is. But I did my best to continue allowing it to be completely abstract; to think only about form and color without thought to function. And though the end result still isn't the sort of painting I thought I wanted to paint, it has a sort of tenderness that pleases me. Somehow -- to me, if to no-one else -- it conveys the sense I've had lately of being held in the arms of the Divine. And I'm grateful for that.
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