solstice reflections

A lot less blogging these days. This is a period of creative recuperation, of being out in the world and looking and feeding, of listening and watching.

I see now that it's also a period of transition. My show this year was an extraordinary bringing together of years of work; a harvesting of the intuitive, of all that had come as I tried to step out of my way, holding my breath, looking for lightness and fun, for life itself.

I will paint again in the fractally world of deep cells and stretched out universes. But now whatever it is that calls and resonates in that way is now calling and resonating (again) in its second form, the constant return to India. Not only literally, but conceptually, emotionally, existentially.

I remember when India broke through... Wondering what was going on, how these two things were going to connect, work together.

I can remember posts where I looked at what I called the two strands and could not see how it was going to happen. Innumerable posts, on both blogs/sites, about this relationship, including ones about times when I just decided to just stop trying. 

And I remember coming back from my-first-trip-to-India-for-nearly-two-decades last February and feeling all this moving again. And then I got the chance of the show, and it all went back underground, or so it seemed, back to waiting in the damp earth.

Except that actually it didn't. I remember a time soon after the show, when it suddenly became clear that everything that I was interested in, in terms of the Indian aesthetics, and the purpose of those aesthetics (because they do have a very clear purpose), was actually happening with the sand. Most importantly, not just in the image, but in the process; and not just between me and the image, but between the process and its audience.

Sandpainting as performance was actually creating the conditions that the aesthetic image is designed to create within the ritual spaces of India, and its effects. Eventually I'll write something about this, but for now, I can see it, and I know that it's true.

What emerges always seems to come from the corner you least expect it.

And, without this kind of reflecting and writing here, especially with something as transient as a sandpainting, it's easy to miss what has happened.

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