Extras

Describing the Process

I’m quite sure ethering isn’t a word but it describes the process that creates my Flights of Fancy.

My son, Josh, is an artist. He’s also non-verbal and non-ambulatory and needs help in all areas of his physical life. He has cerebral palsy.

His disability makes attaining his goals a challenge. Most of the time I don’t think about his disability. It’s simply a fact of life, but the challenge of helping him involves a lot of thought. I very seldom take credit for anything in his life. The struggle is his, and the successes are his also, but there is one area of his life that I am very proud of.

What pleases me most about him is his attitude. He has far more drive than I ever dreamed of. He is ambitious, dedicated, and focused. Those are all qualities that are in short supply for myself. He is a dedicated member of the Ottawa Art League: http://ottawaartleague.org   and he has his own website: ourhomestudio.com

He possesses more business sense than I ever dreamed of. But the one thing he doesn’t have, can’t have, is productivity. He is a slow painter. A meticulous artist. It can take up to three months for him to complete a painting. For him to do art shows, he needed my help.

I don’t consider my artwork to be as marketable as Joshua’s. I paint portraits. There’s not a big market for that and for Josh to be able to set up at shows and offer new work, I needed to figure out how to paint something besides a recognizable face.

I didn’t have a clue how to paint without a photo reference to look at. So I decided to experiment. Using watercolor, I threw paint onto wet paper, then tilted and tipped, running the colors together until they created a pleasing pattern.

Then I let it dry, set it up where I could look at it, and just lived with it for almost a week. Every day I’d rotate the paper to get a new angle on it. And slowly, an image started to emerge from the pattern. I started to see something in the paint.

My theory was to let the paint tell me what the painting was going to be. Instead of me looking outward, I went inward.

Something happened in that first Flight of Fancy. The act of going inward, of seeing the paint in a new way, impacted me in a very big way. It opened a door to creativity that I had never experienced before.

It triggered a new phase of writing for me. With the painting came a poem. I had never written poetry in my life and suddenly, I’m being given words, sentences and entire poems that seem to come from the ‘ether’.

My brain started feeding me images, ideas, and plots so quickly I had trouble keeping up. More exciting to me, and potentially more useful, it also triggered left brain activity allowing me to put together a business plan, and energized me to create an environment conducive to productivity.

This page will be devoted to the works and words that have come to me from the ‘ether’. They come to me without rhyme or reason, but I consider each one a gift, and a blessing. I’d like to share them with you.