Sometimes I carry a painting around in my head long before my brush ever hits the canvas or my pastel strokes the paper. Such is the case with this pastel.  I have been watching the late afternoon sunlight  through the trees for weeks, longing for the right moment to get it from my head to the painting.  I've also watched the cows as they follow their fence route every day. On this day lighting and cow were just right. The painting seemed to pop from eye to head to hand almost effortlessly.  The experience is quite addictive. I'm glad it's an addiction that produces instead of destroys. I feel blessed. 

Two things I love are reading good books and painting good pictures.  It has occurred to me tonight that the processes are opposites.  When I read a good book, I am  digging out  the wealth that someone has put into the words. When I paint a good painting I seem to have to dig the good stuff out of myself.  Of course the “good stuff” is a mix of wealth that I’ve received from other sources, absorbed and applied,  but the arrangement and understanding of the “stuff” of a good painting is also a part of me. I am giving out, not just taking in. 

That is what makes painting so much more difficult.   Each session of putting on paint leaves me with a new puzzle to solve, a decision to make.  Some of the process is intuitive, some very deliberate.  It is often easy to feel as if I have run dry during the process, but after a wait, a new direction reveals itself. 

 

One of my favorite Scripture passages asks, "For who has despised the day of small things?"  That has become my mantra for my art. I don't have the privilege of going to the studio every day and painting as long as I would like, but I do have the privilege of carrying a sketchbook wherever I go and it is filled with people and things---people at the lunch counter in Sam's Club, those in front of me in the post office line, the preachers who stand before me each week,  the dog on his pillow,  the lecturer at the last meeting,  those in the waiting room,  the family in front of me at Cici's, the trees across the street while I'm waiting in the car.  And I'm finding that every scribble in that sketchbook  works to improve my drawing and my visual memory.  

The other daily ritual that is making a difference  is following Ian Robert's suggestion in MASTERING COMPOSITION to make a composition a day.  

Small things will, I hope, exponentially improve my art. They already feed my creativity. 

In one of my earlier blogs, I mentioned that I collect definitions of art
Today I found an interesting statement by Iris Murdoch: “All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. “  Is that true?  What is it that we hope to accomplish by making art?

For me painting or drawing is an imitation of the Creator since God is the only really original Creator. I like what Kathyn Lindskoog says on the subject: “There are great limits upon the human imagination. We can only rearrange the elements God has provided. No one can create a new primary color, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or a completely original animal. Even by writing a book, planting a garden, or begetting a child, we never create anything in the strict sense; we only take part in God's creation. “    

Striving to create something of value is a struggle to be virtuous.