The mind and heart race and battle like two sparrows gliding and spinning around each other, tucking in their wings for a speedy dive then swooping into a steep upward thrust in an exquisite spiral dance. I love it when I just happen to catch our natural world being so playful, so simple.
I strive to paint like this and think like this, perpetually rounding off the corners looking for that smooth grace line. A kind of fun and sophistication that can’t be mimicked, it’s so spontaneous like a sudden laugh that heals everything around it and people suddenly fall in love without knowing where or to who it belongs.
It’s easy to equate art with everything we know about love, especially when it’s fading in and out of favor in striations that taint our lives. Those are the times when we have this great opportunity to transform a thing, to move a mountain or lift effortlessly into the sky like those sparrows and glide on sharpened wings in pure exultation. Challenges met with a surge of triumph and we’re over half way there. Of course none of this really matters when we’re collecting the bones of the ancients and performing their resurrection rites. Unaware and half way here we look to the past for guidance on the future and found out that experience is a souls journey to a very multi-dimensional present-state in the ‘here and now’ that makes up a lifetime.
Mixing paint in an old studio surrounded by useful and useless things alike has always been business as usual. My art career was just getting started and it was exciting . There were plenty of visual distractions in the eclectic space as if a tornado did all our shopping and housekeeping. Being in earshot of so many different things kept the tiny bustling cityscape in mind at all times; from the ever english BBC mumbling on in a corner to a couple of different conversations in the other room talking over a random documentary on youtube shuffle. There were the people chattering on and kids laughing in the streets with all the cars buzzing around honking and stopping, turning and blocking each other. And near me a few people in my part of the studio were usually idling on about something or other. I would use this as the heartbeat monitor for the whole mess. I found it soothing after a while and embraced it like a cuddly hybrid child with adorable eyes I could call my own. The beauty in chaos was a sort of working meditation that took the stale air out of infinites cursed conclusions babbling on in my head, so I took the medicine happily and thanked the good doctor for my sanity.
Mixing these colors of compassion, I could feel deeply how it was all meant to be as it is somehow. Life was so alive. Of course it was loud. I liked how it drowned out the noise in my head and forced me to find the spaces between. I learned about the dances and battles of life and how bendable and interchangeable they are.
It’s interesting to think now that being able to capture the holistic view of a painting allowed me to use the muddy messes I made when I didn’t know what I was doing. To my amazement the bold violets and rich yellows, deep purples and refreshing greens came alive over the earthy tones and natural greys that were under neath.
When I could summon up some real courage I would dive my brush into the messiness with a pure color and swoop through it, blending and soaring over the landscape with a beautifully loaded brush.
All the magic was right there, right in the barriers and inhibitions, in the disappointing eyes and harsh words from the past that still echoed and burned in the sensitive and charred parts of my psyche. There were always those paralyzing fears of embarrassing myself or seeming weak in a moment of vulnerability and yet here, right here, all the freedom and grace I was looking for came the instant I burst through the flood gates. A tidal wave of exhilaration came up right behind me and crashed forward. I rode that enormous wave right to the shore of humanities timeless story and it spoke its wordless wisdom, coming out in the language of paint and canvas.
I felt apart of the spiral dance in that moment standing on the shores of humanities love and pain, passion and urges, harmony and chaos. Here was a road map of the souls journey, here were my field notes getting more and more poetic. I was completely beside myself the first time I tapped in like that. I couldn’t believe it was real. I had dipped my brush into the waters of affinity and life flowed through me into the world all around. It was a weekend love affair in the hot summer storms of youth I couldn’t explain to anyone and it kept me yearning for years. I wanted more, so much more of it. I was beginning to understand us all as human beings and spiritual creatures of light and dark and felt love for our struggles and triumphs. Here it all was and it was all happening in and around us. It was an overview of all the un-owned joy and celebration that seems to just exist on our marbled looking glass of earthen umbers and slow melting sea blues into white; and here we are rocketing through space to where we know not. I love this perspective of looking back on our planet just to marvel at the wild anomaly of any of this happening at all and yet there’s each of our microcosms existing in the ecosystem we so easily forget. I’ll use this grand finale visualization to find that awe inspiring gratitude for just about anything i’m dealing with.
We can all tap in like that at a moments notice, catch flight and soar where we are. You can probably remember a time when grace lifted you up and showed you more, gave you a new vantage point to see and think from. These moments stand above the rest of our memories and urge us on. They invigorate the rest of life with the stuff of dreams and it’s exciting. It’s as if we were especially designed to experience just such a thing and follow it wherever it goes when it calls out to us to come and find it. All the while these messes we create along the way truly do make the bold and refreshing colors more real, more human, so much more alive and powerfully active. Let’s stay inspired today. Let’s build something incredible from here.
This blog is a interactive artistic journey I’m just starting out on. I’ll be bringing you into the artist’s mind and heart as I know it so that you may also find yourself there. We are intrinsic artists by our very nature. Every cell in our body sings out creatively to express and be heard. Born from the dust of stars we yearn and fight for that eternal freedom again and again. To love as we want, be what we want and do what we want. To feel how alive we are right now with everything at our fingertips.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey together. Please let me know what you think? Your thoughts and opinions are important to me. Sign up on my newsletter to stay updated on our weekly blog posts. We’re just getting started here. I have so much more I want to explore.
P.s.
i’ll be adding an audio version of this blog soon along with a guided meditation i have developed and used many times over the years.
stay in tune, stay inspired.
Luke Caleb Lamar