Golden Sunday

I like the thought of a snowball rolling down the hill picking up layers of snow and growing.

I have a dear friend, Joanne, who is wonderfully artistic, and thru her I met new wonderfully artistic friends Nadine and Renee and Tammie, and a new challenge. The challenge to depict a word as an image.

You know, sometimes I think it’s strange how some people link being creative to some mysterious, spiritual commodity. I mean like being somehow in tune with a god, or a muse or having some extraordinary genetics with which to paint, to write or dance. And I must admit it’s the first thing I thought of when I read the word “numen”. A divine creativity, a guiding force, a spirit guiding my hand on the paper.

But I don’t think that numen means anything like that to me. I like to think of it as a creative genius laying in wait inside all our hearts, whether we paint or dance or write or manage a mean turn of double Dutch with the skipping rope. (Don’t laugh, it’s hard)

I think it all hinges on every day rituals, repetition and quantity. It depends on the daily getting out there and dancing, or skipping or whatever takes your fancy and soon numen starts to manifest.

The snowball is rolling right now and I’m really enjoying my work. The more I turned the word over in my mind the more I felt flight and freedom and gold and music, so I tried to put those elements together in one image.

I love the falling apart music note papers that I can break up and collage without feeling guilty for tearing them up. I also love vintage images for compositions; that’s where the idea for these swallows came from. (Because sometimes I get in the mood for immediate gratification and don’t want to look up what I want to draw and sketch it first and twist it around into positions and take all day about it.)

But most of all, it’s so satisfying to paint something which means so much freedom to me. And I already love this image as much as I love Sanctuary.

And, unlike most of the paintings which get stuck into a drawer somewhere, I think this one might hang around the house for a while. 🙂

Art: 10″ X 14″ paper collage on sturdy card, painted in acrylics, with India ink, gold powder and postage stamps.