After my hospitalizations, I did a lot of painting just to paint.  I also hate wasting paint, so I wound up doing a lot of texture exploration using paint that was still usable, but had thickened a little due to drying on the palette.

An artist friend took note of what I was doing and recommended an additive that would increase drying time and allow me to get the same effect without having to deal with thickened paint, which often had pieces of dried paint in it that ruined what I was going for.  Suddenly my range of technique opened up because I had more time to work with the acrylic paint, which otherwise dried very quickly.

I also started using more green in my paintings around this time, which represented life to me, and they lightened in shade, like I was surfacing from the deep waters of the much darker “underwater sunlight” paintings (part 2).  Generally speaking, I was feeling better, with only the odd bad day.  Best of all, I was sleeping well, save for a spell when my meds were being adjusted, which always screws with my sleep.  Once that was settled out, though, it was all good and most nights I sleep quite soundly.  This is remarkable in that I have *never* slept well.  Ever.

I actually came up with an entire key for my art, which I sent to my therapist in an email:

“I’ve noticed recurring themes and figured out what a few things mean. Arcing lines are sound waves, jagged ones are electrical currents. Black and red together = total destruction. Yellow and orange = light. Red alone = fire and pain. Blue = water/ice or electricity, depending on line shape. Purple = divinity. Green = life. White = power. Black = darkness (not necessarily evil). Eyes, winged creatures of all sorts, feathers, fire, trees, and water seem to feature heavily, if not yet in my art, then certainly in my head. I also seem to have a thing for orange and blue together (also purple and green, and turquoise and magenta).”

As if to continue the “surfacing” theme, I did several paintings of the horizon: some on the ocean, some on land.  Some also featured birds.

The last of these is one of the few large canvases I’ve done (most are 12″ or less in width or height) and shows my fondness for rainbows, gradients, and sunrises/sets.

Not long after I did this painting, coronavirus became an issue globally at the same time we got our last reliable paycheck, so I spent a little bit of our money stocking up on canvases and buying a sampler set of paradoxically-sounding water mixable oil paints.  I had tried oils before and loved their texture and blendability, but they were smelly and cleanup was also messy and smelly, what with the paint thinner, so I had abandoned them.  These weren’t supposed to smell and cleaned with soap and water, so I thought I’d give them a try.  Imagine my joy to find a paint that was thinnable with water like watercolors and acrylics, yet had the opacity and workability of oils and acrylics, but had a much shorter drying time than standard oils and had the aforementioned easy cleaning bonus.  My first piece was mostly to play with the paints and see what they could do, which led to the next four:

It was much easier to get nice hard lines as well as get the kind of blending I often strived for with acrylics, but didn’t always get.  Obviously I still had something of an internal division between “hot” and “cold”, but it didn’t seem as extreme as some of my earlier similarly contrasted pieces, which reminded me more of ice and lava than fire and water like these do.  I don’t normally have an outcome or purpose in mind when I paint, but the fourth piece is a deliberate attempt on my part to contain my fire, as it were.  I don’t want it to go out completely: it’s creative fire rather than destructive fire, but both can burn if they get out of control.

I’ve not felt motivated to do any painting since those oils were done a few weeks ago, with the exception of a table on my back porch I’m decorating.  I have been doing quite a bit of writing, though, and now that a couple of years have passed since my “awakening”, I can see the alternating patterns of artistic and written creativity interspersed with periods of rest.  I can’t quite time them yet, which annoys me, but I figure I’m always doing what I need to be doing at any given time.

Lately, that’s been resting.  I feel quite burned out sometimes after my mental health experiences of the last couple of years, and now that we’re all living in the time of face masks, hand washing, and economic collapse, some days it’s all I can do to put my feet up on the couch and watch a show.  Preferably something funny.  My husband read me a news story today about how in the last few weeks, Americans’ consumption of Netflix, beer & alcohol, porn, and cannabis has skyrocketed, and I find that very appropriate.  We should all be doing whatever needs to be done to comfort ourselves in these uncertain times.