Painting is a daily practice for me, and I have come to rely on its ability to ground me. It hardly matters what I choose to paint, the important thing is to keep at it. I may not know what to do, but if I listen, something usually comes. A friend of mine sent me a picture of a fire snail. I looked at the goth looking gastropod with disbelief. I wrote her back and said it must be AI. No way could such a beauty exist. She wrote back and exclaimed “It’s REAL!”. I’m pretty good at telling AI, so I had to investigate. It was true, it is a real snail, maybe the photo had a little color enhancement, but just a bit.
I had been having connections with spirals, and feeling a bit like that’s where we are at as a culture. It seemed clear I had to paint this snail who tricked me into believing it didn’t exist. Their shells are a rich black, with gorgeous highlights. I decided to contrast it with a somber butterfly. These two are a reversal of our usual perception of snails and butterflies.
I thought about how it doesn’t matter if there’s any veracity to this pairing, I just liked the two of them on a visual level. I wasn’t even sure what kind of butterfly I was painting. I had done a search for grey butterflies, and it popped up on flickr.. It was exactly what I was looking for. As I was working on the painting, I decided to investigate both creatures. To my surprise, both are quite rare and found in Malaysia!
Tuning into distractions is part of the process for me, I feel like I’m a filter feeder and things do trickle down. I don’t want to get paralyzed by the madness of the vortex we are caught in, so I keep on keepin’ on. Art is a bit like alchemy, magic can be found there, even in times of deep sadness.
Painting is a daily practice for me, and I have come to rely on its ability to ground me. It hardly matters what I choose to paint, the important thing is to keep at it. I may not know what to do, but if I listen, something usually comes. A friend of mine sent me a picture of a fire snail. I looked at the goth looking gastropod with disbelief. I wrote her back and said it must be AI. No way could such a beauty exist. She wrote back and exclaimed “It’s REAL!”. I’m pretty good at telling AI, so I had to investigate. It was true, it is a real snail, maybe the photo had a little color enhancement, but just a bit.
I had been having connections with spirals, and feeling a bit like that’s where we are at as a culture. It seemed clear I had to paint this snail who tricked me into believing it didn’t exist. Their shells are a rich black, with gorgeous highlights. I decided to contrast it with a somber butterfly. These two are a reversal of our usual perception of snails and butterflies.
I thought about how it doesn’t matter if there’s any veracity to this pairing, I just liked the two of them on a visual level. I wasn’t even sure what kind of butterfly I was painting. I had done a search for grey butterflies, and it popped up on flickr.. It was exactly what I was looking for. As I was working on the painting, I decided to investigate both creatures. To my surprise, both are quite rare and found in Malaysia!
Tuning into distractions is part of the process for me, I feel like I’m a filter feeder and things do trickle down. I don’t want to get paralyzed by the madness of the vortex we are caught in, so I keep on keepin’ on. Art is a bit like alchemy, magic can be found there, even in times of deep sadness.