Alchemy

Artist Jacqui Beck's thoughts about a series she's painting called Inside Outside accompany me as I begin working on a new painting. She articulates the following in a short video:

As an artist I bring my inside outside,

Who I am gets expressed into the work.

How I think about the world,

How I encounter the world,

How I experience the world

Coming inside me,

Getting churned around,

And then coming out in my work.

At the tail end of a(nother!) day filled with more cyber challenges than I can handle with any grace, let alone savvy, I am called strongly to play with line and color. I am pulled to paint on a page torn from a copy of Little Women given to my daughter by my mother, a book that ends up becoming, decades down the road, a comforting art journal for me during a dark time. One of the pages has paint on it from two years ago, an expression of my inside manifesting itself outside in that place at that time. And, of course, whatever is inside has been forged by many outside encounters and experiences. 

I grab a paint pen now and begin drawing lines around patches of paint to create shapes. 

The outside that influences and impacts the inside churns around unceasingly and, as an artist, that who-I-am gets expressed into my work every single time I paint.

The alchemy amazes and sustains me.

work in progress