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.

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