It is over a week since I last posted. The time has flown. But, I have finished my large 'galaxial' painting I wrote about in a recent post. And, there it is above. It's a 90 x 200 cm painting, so is rather long and large.
I wanted to create a painting that surprises...but surprises in a way which triggers a wonderment and a pondering. There are a few types of surprise and the one we humans seem most addicted to, is shocked surprise. What I mean by 'shocked surprise' is a, 'Oh my goodness, how could that happen', kind of surprise. You know... when revelations of debauchery, floundering, misuse of public funds, romantic affairs, drunken footballer behaviour and so on and on and on, are made. We read or hear about these sorts of events, we tutt tutt or sympathise or criticise, and then forget about it until we are induced by media headlines to react the same way to the next shocking revelation. The constant cascade of shocking news seems to desensitise reactions causing feelings of helplessness. In a way, feeling shocked is all we think we can give.
So, getting back to the kind of surprise I want to induce...wonderment kind of surprise...the kind that actually makes your brain feel like its be stimulated because synapses and dendrites get a workout...the kind that makes your heart sing...the kind that opens gates inside your imagination...the kind that makes you dream. The kind that can actually...possibly....stimulate creative solutions to some of the world's problems.
My galaxial painting is an elliptical galaxy shaped long tree! The tree starts in the middle and twists its way around. Yes, regular readers of my blog will recognise the tree as my transcultural/religious tree-of-life and/or tree-of-knowledge. I have been reading about galaxies recently and an image of a tree-of-life galaxy jumped into my imagination as I was reading. As it jumped into my imagination I felt like perspective disappeared into the seemingly liquid distances of space. Galaxies and their formations remind us that life/existence was compelled to form within nanoseconds of what is called the Big Bang. We are part of an ongoing process of life unfolding. We and our evolution are linked to the compulsion for life which errupted in those first nanoseconds. Now that's amazing, surprising, exciting and wonderful.
This painting is also linked to my interest in the distances of the micro and macro, the intimate and vast, the nano and the universal, the global and local. By using a commonly understood motif such as the tree I wanted to bring the universal into the grasp of some kind of human scale, to collapse distance and to remind that Earth is our home [at the moment and for the foreseeable future!] so we must honour, respect and love it.
I wonder what it would be like if we were addicted to wonder?
Cheers,
Kathryn
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