Heartsong Studio

If the slow start to spring reflects your own artistic lack of umph, here’s a spring tonic.

You might think you cannot make a painting if you can’t draw anything. Or, you can work endlessly on a piece and it seems to go nowhere, or stay unresolved. If you have just finished a big painting, you may feel spent.

So what can you do at times like this ? Do you close up shop and conclude that you mustn’t be much of a natural artist, or you’d always be head over heels in love with some image or piece you’re working on ?

I wouldn’t buy that if I were you !

There’s a simple fix for your spirits that anyone can use, whether you’re an experienced artist or still a wanna-be.

This is what I do, and you can too.

Go out and pick up old plywood boards. They could be rectangular, or not. One of my favourite pieces has a very irregular shape. You might need to wash off hunks of mud.

It helps to have access to a workshop, garage, or backyard with old pieces of wood lying about, or at least a partner, friend or neighbour with the same. Access to a beach with lots of junk washing ashore is an excellent source for your adventure.

Ready for the highly technical bit ?

It’s a lot like lying in a hammock looking at cloud formations. Turn each over on all sides and from all angles. What you’re looking at is the wood grain. See the grain pattern with soft eyes.

Eventually some form will jump out at you, like a familiar landscape, a wheat field, a shoreline, or who knows, even a prehistoric bird.

You don’t have to draw anything !!!

There’s lots of paintings waiting for your discovery out there. When you find one that catches your fancy, simply follow the wood grain with quite watery acrylic paint, toning the colours to suit what you’ve found. A knot hole could be a sun, moon, or eye. Ripples could be the forest floor or sand on the shore.

Here are two of mine:

Medicine Beach is made by the Infinite, not me, I swear.

All I drew - if drew is the right word - was the horizon. This line wasn’t in the wood grain, and it isn’t even straight ! The shape of the point jutting out is exactly like a beach here called Medicine Beach.

By keeping the paint very watery it looks like the water’s edge, where you can see the sand ripples.

If you find it, it’s yours.

After finding and teasing out this beach, without contributing much more than a horizon line, the feeling was of renewed faith, and having been given a gift.

Morning Star

The extent of my contribution to Morning Star was a couple of slivers !  All I did for this one was break off some of the layers of frayed plywood so it was uneven.

Then I saw what looked like a distant city, and painted lines of dry grass across the cracks for a field outside the city as my vantage point. Two knot holes made the Sun and Venus, the morning star, hence the title.

This was another renewal of creative faith.

To find a gift waiting for you, to help it become visible, is an incredible feeling. It’s a little like getting away with something, you know. And you are. You’re getting away with delight at some of the gifts all around, just meant for you to find.

It’s finding gifts that only you can find, and that makes you feel quite special. And you are.