Saturday, March 21, 2009

Painting and musing



Last night we painted until about 2am. It is now 6:30 am and I really should be sleeping, but I am a creature of habit and this is just when I get up :) One of my moms came over last night and she did the lions share while we ran support crew. The whole process was oddly alchemical. I would have missed that but in the middle a friend emailed me a question on alchemy and I realized I was knee deep in it at the time.

My birthday always brings about ponderings but as of late they really get me thinking about the universe. About 6 years ago I was told that in 5 years I would be dead or need a new liver. Magick is an amazing thing. Though the line from Monty Pythons the Holy Grail comes to mind "I am feeling much better now..." My birthday always serves to remind me that we are all always living on borrowed time, so we should make the most of it. I do my best everyday to remember and live that.

The painting was very much reminicent of my childhood. This mom is one of the very few working artists I know. ( Yes I have two matched sets of parents, I often do not make any distinction between the biological and the stepparents. My theory is that if you have raised me since I was 5 you should get some damned credit.) It also means that as a kid we painted the house and many relatives houses MANY times. It was not unusual for her to get a new piece of furniture or a whim and move the living room into the family room. The running joke was "is it Wednesday already?" Some of that was great fun.

The process of painting itself is sort of like mirroring the Great Work. You realize that you are tired of what is in front of you ( conciously or not) and then agonize over the direction. (Anyone who has not had the 2 month discussions in paint stores over a particular shade of green just has not lived!) Then you get all ready to do it and realize that there is a TON of prep work that you did not expect. Then you strip everything off the walls to the bare bones and scrub anything that cannot run out your way. Next you fill holes and are still well into the prep work when you think foolishly, "Oh I am almost done." The painful reality is that you have not even really started yet and the house is torn to chaos. You start to question if all of this crap is really worth it. Finally you start doing the detailed Work only to find that it is slow going and you secretly bitch to yourself that a roller would be so much faster and I mean really who is going to see THAT corner??? You resist the temptation to just slap paint up there because the reality is - YOU will see it forever. You finally get to the rolling and it flies. You think 4 hours for 10 minutes of REAL WORK? No! 4 hours of prep so the WORK comes out how you want it. You get really proud of yourself and are overjoyed to be done only to find out that you missed a spot way in the corner....

Welcome to my universal ponderings. Now back to painitng...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Who is the cat?

Soror Gimel said...

It is from the cover of "Why Cats Paint." If you are a cat person it might be a great read. It is not however me or my mother :)

Unknown said...

Maybe the author will write a sequal, 'Why Dogs Dig the Crap Out of Soft and Squishy Pillows and Blankets'.