“Beauty is there to be noticed. Too often it is taken for granted because we are moving too fast to let it in and allow it to deliver its message in us. We need to pay attention. To show indifference to beauty is an insult to its Creator.” (90) Luci Shaw Beauty And The Creative Impulse
She’s swirling blues and greens together with the tip of her brush. The excess water causes pigments to run and bleed into each other at the edges. One color takes on the hues of the other and they are no longer two colors, but one. One vibrant shade of peacock teal, a color I have grown to love in recent years. This color reminds me of my Grandmother, and of my own Mother, and if I lived within it’s borders, this rich blue-green would be home.
She gives up the paintbrush in favor of getting her fingers right in to it. Her finger tips will bare shadows of this vibrant shade for the next two days but I don’t stop her. I know what it is to want to rub hands directly onto the art, to pull the colors straight through to the tips of my fingers.
She puts her fingerprints all over the page.
I love the way she expresses what’s inside, on the outside.
Her peeked cheeks flush with the thrill of color filling the page, beauty created out of nothing. We were made for these things, this melding of colors, for the blue and green days– He shines through us, this magnificent Creator of color and when we streak it bright and messy on paper, we experience a fraction of the thrill of creating.
She paints like a wild Pollock protege, her entire body whirling in the chair, and I can’t stop thinking about the peacock-teals that filled that old gravel roofed house in South Miami, the teal (Teal!) metal cabinets that I remember in the kitchen with the toille wallpaper- my baby’s swirling paint and I am back in time, in a kitchen with black flecked floors looking out over a half circle drive, shaded by old Oaks and spanish moss.
I’m lost, wandering the watery ways of my memory, one thought, one image, bleeds steady into the next until it’s all just a huddle of color.
She’s rubbing her fingers together, enjoying the feeling of slippery pigments as they seep into each crevasse and fold of her hands. This is how we live life. This is our art.
We submerge our whole selves into these moments and we watch with fascination, as the colors bleed and mingle–
And a new color emerges.
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This post is shared with L.L.Barkat
And with Laura Boggess,
