07 Jan If I Could Turn Back Time
Every painting has a creation story behind it – here’s how this painting slowly unfolded for me…
by Barbara Bose
I was riding my bike past the home of a dear friend of mine. She is a budding artist who paints abstracts. She must have a different relationship with her work than I do because as I rode by, I spotted a couple of finished paintings poking out of her garbage can.
A strong believer in the very specialness of art, not to mention our precious environment, I thought about all the effort and material, resources, trouble and thought it took to birth that thing, and felt badly about seeing it end up part of a garbage mountain which is down the street. So I asked my friend for her discarded canvas. Maybe it would have better luck with me since I could gesso over it and paint something else.
But the style of my friend’s painting was blobby and, after a coat of white gesso, some colorful blobs poked out the white gesso like mountains above the clouds. So I sanded them with a sander. The sanded blobs made cool splatty shapes and I wondered if I could work them into the composition. But then, after I lost a battle with one very stubborn blob, the canvas ended up with a hole in it.
Back to my belief in the very specialness of art. Besides providing me with an obvious opportunity to convey a message, I see art as an opportunity to receive one. It’s an act of creation, a spark from beyond. I guess it is how art therapy works, and certainly how dreams do.
So the hole in the canvas was also an opportunity, because it held a strong metaphor for me personally. There’s a lot of estrangement in my family. A LOT. And it’s hard. Almost unbearable. Luckily there are wonderful people in my life, and dreams, and especially for me, there’s art! And my wonderful husband supports and encourages me to create. I have had many wise teachers in life and in spirit, whom I listen to. And all of this is therapy for me.
In the early eighties, I moonlighted as a psychic in a tea room. To read for someone, I opened a window in my mind to look and listen for news about the client sitting in front of me. It’s the same feeling when I create something — I need to look at what is in front of me. Well, now there is a hole in the canvas. I asked myself how did the hole make me feel? I noticed that if I was this canvas, there is a hole where my heart would be.
What does a person with a metaphoric hole in her heart look like? I painted these feelings of estrangement as a figure in the center of the canvas as a tiny, armless prisoner, Isolated, overtaken by the sea, waves splashing up against her crumbled igloo-like fortress that was once waterfront property. Disabled, she has no arms to hug her loved ones with. Yet still, this person looks out upon a blue sky – its a lovely day where she resides. She is still optimistic. The actual day to day world that I experience is pretty, sunny, protected and loved. But outside my bubble, in another, more interior aspect, the sun has set and the sea churns from a storm out there. Is it imminent or has the storm passed?
And what does a hole in a metaphoric heart look like? Red, certainly. Bright, yes. Like the sun. Where is the sun? Below the horizon now, because so much time has passed since I made the mistakes that brought me this hole. I wish I could undo them! So that’s also me in the lower left, chained to an impossible task. And that’s me, too, as the barn owl (my lifelong spirit animal), bringing this epigenetic issue (roots in the form of a body painted on a drooly blob) at hand (claw) to my struggling self. And the water pouring down from the snail shell (familial estrangement over generations) reaches parts (not all) of me. It shows that from other perspectives, it is limited. I face it and my hands are engaged in it, but most of me remains apart from it.
While staring at that hole one day, I remembered the old Native American saying, “an antidote can be found within 10 paces.” I looked around my studio and the crystal, the LED light and the chain were all within feet of me. And best of all, the light has a remote.
