Working in a series is a cerebral endeavor that connects thought with experiences and evolves into an exercise in visual and verbal association. When I worked on my Memories series, I went back in time to remember significant vignettes of my life, as I wanted to paint the sensory image as well as its continued impact on my life. It was an enlightening experience. After finishing a series, I will often reflect on its purpose and what I enjoyed about the process. There is often a co-relationship between a prior work and how I choose to move forward in another series. Painting in sequence is a means of focusing the mind, as well as the heart and the hand.
I think I am at an age where looking backward occurs more frequently. Looking back was certainly at the center of Memories, and this concept is present in the new series, It's All About Lines.
This particular group of paintings was inspired by the perceivable motion of Freedom, a memory painting celebrating my blue Schwinn bike and the wind in my hair when I rode it around Groves. I call this series It's All About Lines to represent the many ways lines occur in our lives.
Begin Again was the first in the series, and went through a number of visual changes as I decided on the direction the painting would take. It has rich, deep hues, thinly layered, that can be seen by the viewer in person more readily than in its photograph. Layer upon thin layer, it is tonal, requiring white light to release its color nuance. The gold signifies illuminated thoughts and ideas, as if a person was waking from a place of misconception and illusion to a point of acute awareness, an epiphany of enlightenment. I've always found a state of illuminated wisdom is a great place to begin again.
I often heard, as a child, that the lines in our hands foretold our life's experience in health and longevity. The second painting, Life Line, plays with that concept, along with the visual image of DNA seen as a ribbon twisting and interwoven, holding the secrets of our unique genetic code.
As a child, I was fascinated by the thought of a person's life line representing the individual's vitality and length of life, but more importantly to my romantic nature was the endless possibility of the hand's heart line. It is thought that this line indicates the person's ability to give and receive affection. This third painting, Heart Line, reflects a nest of sorts, where the visual heart rests, protected and secure.
The fourth painting, Moon Waves, celebrates having confidence, finding the authentic self within, and the strength and courage needed to step out of the secure nest, to speak up, to be who we are. There is a quote that I love - Don't worry if you're making waves simply by being yourself, the moon does it all the time (Scott Stable). We need to be true to ourselves, authentic in what we have to say and do, and like the moon, make waves.
A week or so ago, there was a hurricane that made landfall on Mexico's Baja Peninsula, with its effects reaching as far as central Texas. Growing up on the upper Texas Gulf coast, hurricanes and various tropical storms were a part of life. In Squall Line, I chose a cool palette and created the turmoil and energy with bright yellow. The rain and howling wind brought flooding water into our creeks and lakes, overflowing into our streets. The energy released outside was matched within the confines of my work life as dramas played out with a familiar cast. In some respects, I was secure in the calm eye of the storm while the squall swirled around me. It is not easy to leave the negative energy as it seeps into our inner being just as the dampness begins to close the cracks in the dry earth. Every squall line has outer bands of thunderstorms that form ahead of the cold front. This is true in working relationships as well.
Right along with recognizing the root cause of the storm is realizing that there are lines of demarcation that, although they are not clearly defined, we see them in stark reality for the truth that they are for us individually. In my sixth painting in this series, Line in the Sand depicts the subtlety of nuanced color. When we step back, the line is drawn just as clearly as the line William B. Travis drew in the dirt at the Alamo, long years ago. The Alamo's defenders stepped over the line consciously, committing to what they believed, and refusing in any way to be a part of what might have been the easy path.
Last but not least in this series, It's All About Lines, is the painting Coloring Outside the Lines. I have worked at my individual expression since I lifted my first Crayola at the age of 4. I was encouraged at the age of 7 to throw away my coloring book, to draw and express myself. Therefore, staying within the lines holds little appeal for me. Don Miguel Ruiz, in The Four Agreements, takes it further when he encourages us to toss out all that we have been told. We have been so inculcated with rules, standards, decorum and beliefs that it is no wonder we have taken it in and that it became our rules of engagement. Until we closely examine and analyze the effects of these constraints, we are basically committing to living in the prison of standards prescribed for us. We owe it to ourselves to do this. Lines are as we draw them, and can be a circle, a never-ending line, symbolic of infinity, where the possibilities are without end.
