Featured image: Loving relationships – The Cardinal
Cardinals represent devotion, loving relationships, courtship, and monogamy above everything else in the Native American lore. Other tribes, like the southeastern tribe, associated good fortune and sun with them.
www.caring cardinal.com - spiritual symbolism
Featured image: Spirits from the Earth
“The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge.” John O’Donohue
Perceptions are based on how we see something. Perceptions are formed based on how perceptions are controlled. How something is controlled is based on how we behave. And, all of this has a lot to do with our history. Our history is not something we can change because our history is in the past.
If we want to find our spirit, our souls and ourselves, we need to look no further than our perceptions of ourselves and our history.
If we want to honestly be an artist and create art, we must look at what our perception is of what we are creating.
We need to look at how things really are. We must ask ourselves if they are really, really bad or really, really good. We frequently try to kid ourselves as to our perception of something and its actual reality.
For example, I may perceive a work that I did as wonderful and I love it. BUT and this is a big BUT, no one else likes it. While on the other hand, something that I think is horrible others may love. Go figure. That is because of our different perceptions of the same work. My history and their history, both have to do with how we think of anything I may create.
It is about our individual perceptions. Bottom line, it is ok to love something that others see no value in and it is ok to hate something others may love. That is who you are and that’s who they are. This is the aesthetics of reality, and it isn’t one-size-fits-all.
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……. A loon is calling in the distance, such a beautiful yet sad song. The sun is peeking, rising through the woods. Time to start the day.
Featured image: The Whole World
Before I left for our southwest trip I was researching the Celtic art. Especially their knots. The symbolism within the Celtic knot is that all things are interconnected, women together. That means the good as well as the bad are woven into the knot. I wonder, if all things are intertwined, what was the thing that held the know together? I came up with the conclusion that it was faith.
Faith according to the online dictionary is: complete trust or confidence in someone or something. Faith is also, according to the online dictionary, a strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Faith isn’t really a visual. It is just something to believe in and this belief allows us to imagine and create work that illustrates it; like the Celtic know.
Imagining is a major part of who I am and how I think. I used to be pretty clear on what was real and what I made up, but with everything going on in the world, none of that seems to matter. So there are things I do because they are right and they make sense to me, be that they are imagined or real. It seems right to me that experience is the real reason I create art. I figured out a long time ago that what I think and what I wanted to create were two different things. Both are very powerful. I just don’t let them fight anymore. I don’t fight the paint and the mark making anymore when things don’t turn out the way that I expected. I just imagine them differently. Abstract work allows not only the artist but also the viewer to engage in the work and to imagine, to create.
Each day I just go to my studio, turn on the lights and immerse myself and my life to the beautiful mystery of creating and imagining.
When I finish a day in my studio I say to myself as I turn out the studio lights, “this was a good day to imagine.”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” (Albert Einstein)
