Moving into the picture plane...

Again we painted on Tuesday morning, and Tracy is developing her abstract style and balance from week to week.  Above is her revised painting from last week, which she has opened up onto a full plane instead of broken into smaller boxes of the space.  The orange glow is all the more magical because it is behind something else, a suggestion of sky with the blue, and there is real depth because of her variations of darks on the bottom and the white interjected into the top.  I love this piece. Mine is more literal and from this photo seems flat and sluggish despite the water I try to suggest with the white, perhaps too much of it, in the foreground.  I still like the trees dug into the layers of pastels, but there IS something missing.  I shall find it next week or maybe before then, but I won't touch the piece until next week.

Tracy and I talked about doing a show of paintings in groups where we've used the same media as we work side-by-side, clearly in different voices and in different visions.

Still haunted by these photographs of the "blue moon," I post this just to remind myself that there can be clarity even in the deepest dark of night when the air is still and the silence is soft.  It is pouring rain this morning, and my plans for a run before I head into a day of the mundane and the managerial are shot.  I love putting myself in the hands of the weather gods, not insisting that I push against them, knowing that when there is an "opening," I shall be invited into a run, just the way that I will be invited back into my painting to move it where it needs to go.  Giving over myself to something bigger and higher without relinquishing my own voice and energy gives me freedom and force in their highest forms.