Color, Emotion and Videotape

Love Can't Hide by Lil McGill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been going through a phase of exploring emotional awareness, and just how powerfully we are ruled by our feeling life whether we are aware of it or not.  These emotional patterns are laid down in the earliest beginnings of childhood (and likely before) and thus are pre-verbal and often very difficult to name and describe.  However, it is becoming more and more clear to me that when we are able to acknowledge our feeling state in a pretty specific way, we are able to navigate life’s challenges with  a lot more grace, fluidity and, shall I say it, power.

Enter painting.  The kind of painting we do here in our Abstract Laboratory workshop is dominated by our feeling life.  I had to chuckle when I heard that an art show juror told an abstract artist that “abstract artists are so busy expressing their feelings all the time.”  I would have to say that all art is expressing emotion of some kind, that we want art to elicit an emotional response, rather than mental, whether it is highly detailed and realistic in style, or monotone pure abstract.  It is almost as if many people fear the abstract expression, because it is so naked in its transmission of emotional energy.  This I can understand, and yet obviously, I am drawn deep into the abstract world because it is where I find the most beauty, freedom and truth.

In her brilliant book,”The Language of Emotions,” (previously published in the form of the book, “Emotional Genius”), Karla McLaren writes about  the utter importance of acknowledging and honoring all of our emotions, particularly those thought to be difficult.  I have been under the impression all of my life that there are positive emotions and negative emotions, and that half of all emotions are “positive” cheerful, joyous, happy, etc. and the other half are on the darker side, anger, fear, grief, shame, sadness, depression, envy, etc.  Of course there are many ways of looking at all of this, but what I got from McLaren’s work is that the “Happy” emotions are about 1/7 of the spectrum of basic emotional expression.   A friend told me that that is one of the bases of Buddhism. Happiness is just another emotion, and that our American way of chasing after happiness at the expense of listening to what our other emotions are telling us is really getting us into a lot of trouble. So in this light I thought it would be interesting to do a series of paintings depicting a full range of emotions, honoring each one for its beauty and important message held within its particular structure.  I thought I would call the series “52 feelings” and have a new painting for each week of the year, looking at a different emotional flavor in its own separate painting.

Enter color.  My intellect would just love to assign a different color to each emotional state.  That would really tie things up nicely into a bright colored, full spectrum package.  I was able to do this for another series I am beginning to paint, based on astrology.  I have been able to assign my own system of colors to the planets and zodiac signs based on the elements, so that I can explore painting astrological charts in an abstract form. But the emotional spectrum is more difficult to color in. I’ve seen emotional color wheels, I’ve studied the chakra system, I’ve noted that over the internet you can find color associations for different feelings and they are all different.  Which causes me great dismay.  No one agrees!  No one agrees?  When I was young, in my mind’s eye, each day of the week was a different color.  Monday was yellow, and Tuesday was turquoise, and Wednesday was green, and Thursday was brown and orange and Friday was purple, Saturday was multi-colored and Sunday was white.  Everyone I asked had different colors for their days of the week. I really thought all Wednesdays were green. McLaren says that it is really too difficult to assign color associations to feelings.  Because color responses are so subjective.  Everyone has a different color association for different feelings coming from their own intricate experience.  I thought that maybe there was some reliable, archetypal color system – a universal human understanding, but I have yet to find it.

Enter videotape.  Okay, well not videotape exactly, because all the video is digital these days, or so I’m discovering.  Last October our Abstract Laboratory painting class was filmed for the local tv station.  The subject was color, and we all ended up talking a great deal about emotion and our feelings associated with different colors and of course, different colors meant different things to each artist.  In the video I give the example of magenta (one of my favorites).  Magenta, is in the red family, and traditionally could be associated with the first chakra, which is survival, primal fear, instinct, groundedness, danger, passion.  But to me magenta is also joy and expansion, it has an endless uplifting energy.  The color magenta was actually named after the Battle of Magenta, in France, when a brand new color of dye looked like the color of blood from the battlefield and thus was all the rage in Paris.   That has a whole other connotation and I would bet that every color has its own complex and contradictory history of meaning and connections, both dark and light.  I have recently thought that the reason I love magenta so much, and “can’t live without it” as I often say, is that my mother had a cardigan sweater that color when I was four.  Now that’s a personal association of the most powerful nature.

So here’s the question.  Can you paint sadness?  We will be experimenting with this in one way or another in the coming year.  Can you paint love?  Can you infuse your painting work intentionally with a feeling state that could be of benefit to others?  Can your thought-forms infiltrate the water in your painting and manifest in form and color to create a space of healing?

I’m not sure how these experiments will manifest.  There may or may not be a series of paintings coming out of it.  I have a feeling it will have something to do with videotape.  I mean digital video. I feel my creative life restructuring itself, changing media, becoming much more collaborative.  Have you noticed how dramatically and quickly our lives are changing?  It’s all so mysterious, and we have so much to learn, and thus, the work of the abstract painting laboratory goes on.

Endings and Beginnings

This month I was going to write about color and emotion, but it turns out I’m not ready.  I have been doing a lot of exploration and learning and reading about emotional intelligence, and considering how that interfaces with the use of color in painting, and I am integrating this slowly.  This inner process is taking awhile, in the midst of moving my home this past summer and now just last week moving my art studio as well.  Talk about emotion. Leaving the Long Barn studio turned out to be quite difficult, as my attachment to its many wonderful qualities revealed themselves to be quite strong. This is a space that I had inhabited for 17 years, this is where I learned to paint, and where I developed my particular form of creating. It was my haven, and my place where I could go to connect with myself. It was a place that I shared with many friends and students, creative projects, classes and workshops. The south facing windows overlooking a large pond full of wildlife, a blue heron, and two white egrets, the Canadian geese that came to nest each year, the many deer in the blackberries, and 10,000 frogs. This is where my kids grew up helping me stretch canvas and mix paint. It’s where my husband and I ran many art-related businesses. It’s where so much of my life has happened.  This is not really about nostalgia. It is about me acknowledging and being thankful for the energy and stability that a space like that has offered to me. I often felt that in that space I was in connection with the spirit world, the animal spirit world, earth spirits. Water spirits. Air spirits. There was something so simple and funky about that barn that allowed great creative freedom. A tin roof that was astoundingly loud when it hailed, or when the acorns blew down while the tyvec rattled on a windy day. Not to mention the best concrete floor ever……Paint everywhere!!  So all that being said, it has been utterly clear that it was time to move to a new space. Sometimes we don’t really know why, just that a move, a change, is necessary. So I am blessing that beautiful piece of land, and the people I shared it with for so many years, and the wonderful old barn full of art studios and lots of other junk. I am hereby letting it go to be used for a new purpose, with love and great appreciation.  Last Saturday we moved the studio to my new place, all the tables and paint, the baskets of rags and bolts of silk. Today we started setting it up (thanks Jennifer!), finding the right spot for each element of the studio, for painting and for teaching. And I could feel my energy returning, letting go of the old and allowing the new to come in. There was a feeling of excitement and anticipation and wonder. I could feel the space itself welcoming us. Welcoming its new purpose, thrilled to be used in this way, to be lit up by such bright colored energy. Such feeling. Such life.  Last week in our astrology/creativity class we studied the sign of Scorpio (Oct 23-Nov 22), ruled by Pluto, the planet of destruction and creation, deep passion and ruthless transformation, endings and beginnings, birth and death. So intense. But I loved it, because it so described this process of dramatic change that we all seem to be going through in one way or another these days. There is a sadness at the end of any era and I am feeling it. And by feeling it I can renew myself and make room for whatever’s next. What color is sadness? Can I paint this feeling? Stay tuned, I’ll talk about that more next month. I think I’ll be ready for it then.

Connecting to the Magic

At our marketing mojo workshop last week we had a lively conversation about the inner workings and magnetism involved in selling art. Since then I have been considering this subject in more depth. For awhile now I have switched my thinking about marketing from “selling something to somebody”, to a new understanding that marketing is about communicating the value of what you do so that others will see it clearly enough to be able to benefit from what you are offering. So I thought I would try modeling this for you to see what this might look like. I am going to attempt to communicate to you what I see my value is as a painter and as a teacher.

The art I create is a kind of color poetry. It is full of mood, the beauty inherent in the colors themselves, and is a transmitter of a language of feeling. Original art of all kinds can raise the aesthetic of your environment to a higher level, a higher vibration, and this art in particular also creates an entry into an inner world, a connection to magic, a sense of wonder, timelessness, eternity, deep space and inner space, deep sea and deep feeling. This art is about the emotions. It’s not to be understood with the mind. It’s about feelings and developing a connection to a feeling language that is not based on words. It is also a very feminine field of life in these paintings, intuitive, visionary, soft or wild, it is about the energies of your deepest nature. It is a way of translating this unseen world of your feelings into a visible form expressed in the flow of color on the canvas.

So when you have one of these paintings in your home it can be a reminder of this world for you, it can cause an emotional response, it can be a part of your own vision quest, an entry into your own inner world and a connection to an intuitive language that we are so in need of developing more of right now. These paintings reveal mysteries. As the painter, I am a conduit for archetypal images of all kinds, especially because I am not imposing form of any kind in these abstract works. So when form comes through it is all the more wondrous, as if messages are being received from beyond our known sphere…

I could go on and on in this exercise of defining value, from different angles, now that I have removed the uncomfortable self-consciousness of having it to be only about me. It’s about me, but it’s also about being an instrument for the energies of life and our developing consciousness of what it is to be living here, now. That’s not exactly a refined artist’s statement, but it’s a pretty good start.

Now I will tell you about my value as a teacher. I see my value as a teacher mostly in what I don’t teach you. I’m kind of like an un-teacher. At our Thursday abstract laboratory class I basically invite you into a space where others are painting. I give you a two-minute lesson to start you off and that’s it. Keeping this simple creates an easy opening into your own playful experimentation. And then I keep you interested long enough for your own creative impulse and your own powerful and unique expression to unfold and develop. I may come in and gently guide you this way or that. Encourage or comment, but really what’s important is that you paint. You paint and you paint and you paint. And everything you need will come to you.

I also understand the fear of painting, the fear of facing yourself in the form of the canvas. Because that’s how I started, with utter self-disgust and critical judgement of what I was revealing of myself, and how horrible it was. Such misery. I have great compassion for those beginning stages of breaking through your creative blocks. Because I know from experience that it doesn’t take long to get through them, with a little encouragement and gentle persuasion. That’s what my teacher did for me, and that’s what I am passing onto you. That’s what I am un-teaching you. I am not teaching you how to paint. I am just creating a space that you can hang out in long enough so that you find your own way. And I believe that is an extraordinary gift, a rarity.

So I am beginning to see how really grounding myself in the value of what I am offering to others will strengthen and energize all of my marketing efforts, the expansion of my business and the constant development of my skills and knowledge both as a painter and as a teacher. And I am also beginning to see how important it is for us all to know our value and to be able to communicate it unwaveringly. To stand for who we are and not diminish our gifts and talents, and our unique offerings to the rest of the world.

We are living in a very unusual time. There is dramatic change all around us and a feeling of losing our bearings. What I have come to feel about this these past few weeks is that this is the time when we need more painting, not less. This is not the time to give up on the magic. It is time to throw ourselves even more into our creativity, and ride the wave of unprecedented transformative energy. I’m about to go into the studio for my day of painting, to immerse myself in a world of color, of feeling, centering in my inner self, connecting to that magic…and I can’t wait to see what appears on the canvas.

Without Hope or Despair

I have painted three times since my last report. The first time, as predicted, was pretty much of a write-off. I worked on thirteen paintings at once, maybe four of them were okay. And a good splash of ruby-pearl metallic paint on the wall of my new garage-studio. The second Saturday was better…what I had learned from the first session is that I basically started exactly where I left off when I stopped six months ago. The space the same, a bit rushed, a bit trying to do too much, a bit unsatisfied with the results. I was only expecting that I show up in the studio, that was the first thing. And then when I was finally there, I wanted to paint everything in sight. Which isn’t always the best thing for me to do.

So the second session I determined that I would slow down, take my time, paint just one, maybe two. Choose my colors carefully, enjoy the time with the color and the music, just one painting. Well I painted four that day and I liked the results very much and felt like I was back in the swing.

The first week I did thirteen paintings and I liked four of them, the second week I did four paintings and I liked four of them. I was starting to get the idea, and so the third Saturday I went back into the studio hoping to paint one large piece, and I ended up with several, nothing to speak of. So you see the ups and downs of this process? You see that it really doesn’t make that much difference what you accomplish week to week, it’s the showing up that makes the difference? Some days will be good and some not so good, but always always, some kind of learning will take place.

Once I painted all day, frustrated with the results and it wasn’t until I was scraping the paint off my hands afterwards in the shower that it dawned on me what I needed to do to solve the particular problem I was having. But I am convinced that if I hadn’t spent all day in frustration working on it I would never have had that breakthrough. So the work you put in is never wasted.

I see these waves of elation and discouragement in my students too. I see the utter frustration which comes after not having consistent results. See the thing is, we’re not consistent people. Our moods, energies, the weather, humidity, cosmology, our personal lives are chock full of changeability and that is always going to show up in our artwork. Our artwork is a reflection of our inner state. It’s a way of bringing our inner state to form in the outer world. Especially with abstract art. With abstract art it is very difficult to hide anything. A lot of people believe that abstract art is easy, so easy. I believe that in a way it is the most difficult, it is the most baring, exposing of all. It is all feeling, all you.

And so I like to think of this painting as a practice, as a job. You go to work, and you do the work and you don’t bother with judging if it’s good or not. It matters that you get the paint on the canvas. One of my favorite poets, Ted Kooser, tells other writers to “write a little every day, without hope or despair.” I’ll say, paint a little every week, without hope or despair. Just get some paint on the canvas and spend a little time with yourself, allowing yourself just to be, opening, soft, kind. Playful. Relaxed. Cultivating your sense of wonder. Delighting in the color, and light, the movement of the water. This is how your best paintings will have a chance to come through.

An Artist Preparing for Battle

A month ago we moved from a very small house in the country to a very expansive place in town.  The ceilings are high, there are closets we haven’t even opened and rooms we’ve barely visited.  I am still huddling in my bedroom like I’ve been used to, venturing out sparingly, mostly when showing friends and neighbors the new place.  It is all so new and unfamiliar that a lot of my innermost fears are right in my face, on a nightly basis.  There are many things that I see and think and feel deeply and most of them are intense.  I suspect that the rest of the planet is dealing with their own forms of intensity and mine just happens to be about moving 10 miles from where I lived for 17 years, to a place we had envisioned for years, and now that it is here, I have to say I’m most definitely still in shock.

Not to say that there are not moments of great joy and expansiveness, a feeling of a fresh, clean slate and possibility.  Not to say that I don’t love to feel that plush carpet under my barefeet, and gaze in awe at the tall trees across the deck. What I feel most is that I have cut out a huge piece of work for myself and I am wondering if I will be strong enough to step into it.   And the huge piece of work is simply this:  getting back to the painting studio.

It has been for the past six months (at least) that I have taken my attention off of painting and put it on manifesting a new home and actually physically making the move just a month ago.  I intentionally made the decision to put a halt to my three year stint of a once a week painting day, after I amped up my teaching schedule and I felt like I was just churning the paintings out without much quality.  I intentionally decided to let the ground lie fallow, to let the next series emerge organically, to rise within me until it would not be stopped. Now I am feeling restless for that creative space, I feel that I have a job to do, but that it could so easily be dismissed, forgotten about, just not gotten to.  I’m moving, I’m setting up a new home, everything is new, take some time to adjust.  Okay, yes, but sometime I’m going to have to face that canvas again.  Not to say that I don’t love facing the canvas.  Just to say that I don’t love facing the canvas the first time after not facing it for awhile.  There is a lot to be said for discipline.  It makes it so you don’t have to break into it again as if it were for the first time.  That’s the hardest part.  It takes will to begin a creative project.  It takes all the forces I can muster within myself to find the energy to go back in there swinging.  Maybe I won’t be able to paint here in the new place?  Maybe nothing will work right.  Maybe I’ve lost my swing?  Maybe….

There is a little book that has been immensely helpful to me in my creative process.  It was written by Steven Pressfield, (who also wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, which is about a golfer who has lost his swing.)  The little book is called, The War of Art, Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.  I keep it by my bedside.  It is one of the few books I would take to that desert island we always hear about.

This book is largely responsible for my ability to produce the amount of art I have been able to produce the past several years.  I really am not a very disciplined person.  I know that.  I have to intentionally create structures for myself to keep myself disciplined, and part of that is what this book showed me, is that my own resistance to my own creativity is absolutely, phenomenally all knowing and all powerful.  It is an enemy like no enemy.  It employs the wiliest of wiles, the most tender and sincere of intelligent reasons and obstacles, both inner and outer, to doing what I’ve set out to do.  And it is an ongoing, daily battle.  At first I didn’t really like the war language.  (Astrologically I have Mars in Pisces, which means my warrior, fighting energy is basically like a swimming fish.  Not so warrior like.)  But it has been helpful to me because it makes it clear what we are up against.  This resistance is not to be trifled with.  It is real and everywhere.  And it’s best to prepare and be aware of the consequences of underestimating its cosmic power.

My friend Aram is a young(er) and prolific artist, and I said to him once, “you must know a lot of artists around here.”  He said, “Oh, I know a lot of artists, but they don’t do any art.”  That is a painful place to be in.  An artist who doesn’t do art is tortured with distraction after distraction.  An artist who doesn’t do art is really unhappy.  And so ultimately, the unhappiness leads you back to art.  The unhappiness and unsettledness and craziness I feel when I am not “getting it done” is worse than the actual acute pain of starting again.  And so I am girding myself for the day when I go into that new studio (a garage with a newly homemade floor) and start mixing the paint and stretching the canvas, and yes actually, getting the paint on the canvas.  Because that seems to be my job.  My job is to go into the studio and get the paint onto the canvas.  And this time, I’m really scared.  More scared than I can remember. But my art teacher once told me what he’s learned to do when he is scared:  “Do it anyway.”   Do it anyway.  And so, soon enough, there will be a Saturday in the coming weeks that I will find myself in my old paint-covered velour pants, kneeling on the floor amongst a slew of wet canvases, with quinacradone magenta all over my hands.  None of the paintings will look like much of anything.  They might be awful.  But  I will look up and brush my hair off my face and get a stripe of phthalo turquoise across my forehead.  And I will say, thank you, thank you, thank you, for I have returned. And I will be home.

(Stay tuned for evidence.)

First and Foremost: Garnet and the Root Chakra

On January 23, Denise Wey and I will be offering our first in a series of monthly creativity workshops based around the theme of gemstones. We did a trial run in November, focusing on Amethyst, and liked it so much that we will be launching a new series this month at AsiF Studios in Grass Valley, this time with the focus on the gemstones associated with the first chakra, especially garnet (but also black tourmaline, ruby, hematite and smoky quartz) –the deep reds and dark mysterious black, silver, and gray. We will be painting with these colors and textures and working on collage making use of the depth of these colors and learning about the various aspects of these stones and also what the first (root) chakra means to us.

The root chakra is associated with the earth element and our connection to the earth. Among other things the first chakra represents our energetic foundation, our security and sexuality, our primal instincts and fears, our sustenance and the creative force of manifestation in the physical world. It seems to be just right to be studying this chakra, when humankind as a whole seems to be so disconnected from the earth on which we live, and when we are struggling on a massive scale with issues of security and fear. I am looking forward to this inquiry, through the lens of creativity, color, texture, mood, and reflection.

We will continue our exploration of the chakras and their associated gemstones in February with our attention tuned to the 2^nd chakra (Creativity!) and Carnelian, and then in March for the third chakra (Emotions) and Amber, and onwards each month up through all seven chakras. Please join us, and add your particular knowingness to our creative circle.

Free Form and Fancy Free

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On December 11, I will offer a fabric painting workshop to show you my simple method of painting on fabric. When I first delved into silk painting I spoke with accomplished silk artists and visited their studios and researched the equipment I would need to get started. Being the kind of artist that I am I like to get started right away and didn’t want to invest a lot until I got rolling. So I built my own frame out of stretcher bars to stretch the silk and started some experiments. I’ve been using my acrylic paints to paint cotton fabric for quilts for several years now, but I wanted to work on silk and see what I could do with it. I tried various silk paints and dyes and settled on one with minimum fuss – no steam setting required, just iron to set the colors. And then I eventually stopped using a frame, which is necessary for delicate, detailed silk painting, but what I do is free form merging of color that I get just as easily working right on the table. So that’s what I do. It’s the Just Do It method of fabric painting that is so easy and liberating because, if you let it, the fabric basically paints itself. The results are gorgeous if you’re not attached to having it look any particular way, but allow the colors to merge and interact with their own natural flow of magic. Silk scarves and shawls, and also recycled cotton …In this way you can restore new life to old clothing, household items like cloth napkins and tablecloths, pillow cases…. favorite t-shirts, dresses! Participants in this workshop will want to bring any light colored items they have because, although I will provide scarves and other items for you to work on, once you get going you’ll want to paint and paint and paint – you’ll want to paint everything in sight.

Creative Collaboration

Lil McGill and Denise Wey at Spark October 2010

The Gemstone Workshop that will be held in my studio on November 13^th represents the beginning of an extraordinary collaboration.  Denise Wey and I will provide the space for a group of artists to explore various aspects of creativity using the theme of gemstones as a focus.  Denise and I have, for as long as we both can remember, been powerfully attracted to gemstones:  their inherent beauty, energy, mystical meanings and applications, the raw form, the polish, the weight, the scientific processes of their creation.  This past year I started a series of gemstone paintings, beginning with lapis, then amethyst, moonstone, turquoise, malachite, garnet, amber and carnelian. I will continue to go on alone with this series, but what inspirs me more than being the solo painter is the idea of the group artistic genius.  When two or more artists work on the same project (under the right set of conditions), great power can be generated and ideas and feelings can be invoked and expressed from a much higher place that would not be possible from any of the artists alone.   I sense the great potential in this idea and have been moved to put it into practice.

For this exploration of gemstones, I felt so strongly that Denise had a part of the puzzle, that we each have just a part of it, and that actually, those who would be attracted to come to a gemstone workshop with us would have the other missing pieces.  We will be exploring the various aspects of gemstones, particularly color and texture and mood through painting and mixed media exploration which the participants will be actively working together to develop and discover how to create gemstone effects in various art forms.   What exactly we are going to be working on and figuring out remains to be discovered.  The gemstones are calling, and we will be listening to their message and honoring their beauty and powerful energies that come from deep within the earth.  November 13^th will be our initial voyage into the realm of creative collaboration. In the new year we are planning to continue our gemstone workshops on a monthly basis (including the stones’ relationships with the chakras) and are in the development stages for other special gemstone creativity workshops that will include writing, collage, painting on canvas, paper and silk, jewelry making and ceramics.  If you are inspired to join us please come on November 13^th and add your unique energy to this magical process.  All experience levels are welcome.  It is not about what we already know, but what we will learn and discover together.

Floating and Creativity



 

Lil McGill

 

This October 23 I will be co-teaching a workshop  called “Accessing the Creative Space – Floating, Painting and Yoga for Women.” We will have gentle yin yoga sessions led by long-time women’s yoga veteran and “flower lady” Jacquie Weills, featuring deep rejuvenation poses.

Jacquie Weills

I will be leading painting sessions, exploring the feminine energy of free flowing color and mood, in the spirit of an understanding of creativity, which begins with the mystery of not knowing where you will end up.  And each participant (limited to just six) will have the opportunity to float in a Samadhi Floatation Tank, for inner world exploration, guided by the original manufacturer of floatation tanks, Lee Perry.

 

Lee Perry

 

I want to explain a little about the floatation tank, as for most people it is somewhat of a mystery.  For me, floating has been an extraordinary tool in times of transition, when I really am wanting to listen to my inner knowing.  Because it is dark and quiet, I feel more “with myself” than ever, and can more easily hear the answers to the questions I am asking.  The tank has many uses, including its unique access to  the creative space.  Writers, artists, inventors, great thinkers, have all used the tank with great delight and to great effect. Here is some information from the Samadhi website:  (www.samadhitank.com)

Samadhi is the original manufacturer of the floatation tank, also known as flotation tank, sensory deprivation tank, float tank, and John Lilly tank used for meditation, visualization, rejuvenation, self observation, creativity, time travel, prayer, solitude, rest and relaxation . Lee and Glenn Perry (of Grass Valley) have been manufacturing these tanks since 1972.

Floatation Tank Description

The float tank is a little larger around than a twin sized bed and chest high. It contains 10″ of water to which so much epsom salts have been added, that when you get in and lie on your back, you are pushed to the surface so you float like a cork, weightless as an astronaut in space. There is a lightweight door that you can leave open, or if you want to get rid of the distractions of noise and light you can close the door.

 

Samadhi floatation tank seethru to show you how remarkably floating occurs in a saturated epsom salt solution

 

Needless to say this is an extraordinarily unique workshop.  It will be intimate and experiential.  We will be exploring a deep connection with ourselves, and through that connection, we will begin to access our most powerful creative energy. For more info visit www.lilmcgill.com.

Rocks

Since I was a little girl collecting shells and stones on the beaches where I grew up, I have loved rocks. I’d bring home the white translucent pebbles, worn smooth by the ocean waves. My mother called them moonstones. Big boulders in the mountains we’d climb, hugging to the cragginess. And my brother polished rough gemstones in a rock tumbler until they emerged all silky and vibrant. This was a kind of magical, alchemical transformation that filled me with an ongoing sense of wonder and attraction to learning about stones, their various properties, as well as their mystical meanings.

Last spring I was inspired to do a series of Lapis Paintings and this summer I have continued the exploration, adding a few stones each painting session. Each one is different, not just in color and texture but energetically as well. Turquoise, I found, leans either to the blue (more copper) or green (more iron) and was thought by the native peoples as the stone of earth and sky. Turquoise transmutes negative energy. It is also peculiar in that, unlike most stones which attune to the wearer, the wearer must attune to the turquoise. Eventually the turquoise will respond and take on the wearer’s characteristics and the two will merge beautifully, as long as the stone is given the proper attention as a living being. Extraordinary.

Attunement, by Lil McGill

I will save my discussion of amethyst until another time, as my experiments have not been successful, except for Amethyst Phoenix which I include in this batch for its mysterious shapes, in spite of its darkness. I will be working toward lighter shades of amethyst, translucent and crystalline.

The special iridescence of moonstone – that flowing movement of color and light across and within the surface is called andularescence – gotta love that word. Moonstone is the stone of intuition and seeing the world how it is, a quality I hold in high esteem.

The malachite paintings were inspired by a malachite-colored silk shawl brought to me from Bombay by my dear friends Danny and Rachel. Malachite is formed by water that has seeped through copper formations for thousands of years. It symbolizes a “mirror of the soul” and a protector of children.

The study of these treasures of the earth is of endless interest to me. It has been great fun working to duplicate the colors and textures and visit with each stone. I will carry on in the fall with more amethyst experiments, along with amber, carnelian and ruby, among others I am sure, as I look toward a gemstone painting exhibit by the end of the year. We’ll have a party and everyone can wear their favorite stones. I’ll see you there. I’ll be wearing moonstones.

To see all the paintings in the new series visit:  http://www.lilmcgill.com/Paintings/html/paintings.htm