A Creatives' Relationship with Reality
Is art a way of escaping reality? Is it how we check out? Or is it actually how we check in?
Solar Starburst, Yellow Dahlia
Watercolor on cold press paper shown at it’s latest stage of progress, late August, 2024.
Of the three recent Dahlia paintings in progress, this is my favorite. It expresses something different and fresh. It sings to me. Yellow, the color, has unusual characteristics in both paint and light. It carries the most light, a subject within color theory of some complexity. Keeping it bright and clear is something painters often struggle with.
A palette of six individual yellow pigments accompanies my work sessions. Colors in the blue, green, and purple range also play a prominent role. A careful intermixing throughout lends overall coherence, providing grounding for the subject Solar Starburst, Yellow Dahlia. As I continue, the yellows will likely become richer, but this has to come last so it remains bright, yet viably subtle.
Muse News, August notes
They say, and it’s true, that great art brings benefit to those it touches. But surprisingly, some still seek to marginalize the arts as impractical, citing it as a means of avoiding reality. This is not true. Art is an essential component of culture. Always bringing forward the new into the now, it is how contemporary life says yes and affirms itself into greater being.
The arts invite us to become more than we were yesterday, yesteryear, and through previous timelines where our paths may have once have crossed. Our potential receives a boost when we’re inspired.
Exquisite Paintings on the Nature of Flowers is a body of work based on a sophisticated visual analysis of Nature's frequencies = LOVE. My long-standing body of work, ongoing and now in phase two, began in the early 1990s and is the culmination of a lifetime quest—a sacred journey into the heart of Nature, beauty, and healing the myth of separation.
Artists walk a fine line between this world and the new one being created. Often presented with challenges, persistence serves the persistent. Artists do what they do because they must. And those who engage freely in the act of creation never look for outside approval. Only honest expression that's congruent with life and how it seeks expression through them. It is a partnership.
On the front lines of the collective, the artist lives wildly and is comparatively untamed, cultivating a type of mastery no institution could ever offer. Unaffected by the norm, they act as instruments who are fine tuned to pick up notes from the deepest longing within the collective. The cry for beauty.
It's in the discovery of what needs to be known that lost treasures are found. From here life moves, breathes, and creates itself through the living beings we call artists. But today we’re all called forward in this capacity. We are the artists of our own lives. Seeking to be more fully engaged, we can dare to lean into life bumps and all. If we’re at least upright in the driver's seat, the horizon is endless, and so are the possibilities.
— Leslie
Dahlia’s have been in focus this August. My watercolor painting Solar Star, Yellow Dahlia is shown below in various stages of progress.
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