Unfolding

12 x 16 oil on paper, Christ in the Wilderness
(after Kramskoy)

The end of June ends my time in San Miguel; I’m still figuring out the next piece of this sabbatical journey.  Two months time here has been restorative, productive, challenging, prayerful.  I began each day with a time of prayer and journaling.  I studied Spanish with Felipa at the Instituto Allende for seven weeks.  I painted each day in the studio I rented from Henry Vermillion.  I ate, drank, and laughed with good friends (and made new ones).

This next week I look forward to meeting my new granddaughter, Allie, who is now three months old; and spending time with my son, daughter-in-law, and grandson.

I am bringing some things to a close and others to a new beginning: art, family, and friends.

It is a journey for which I am grateful even knowing the temporal quality, holding things not too tightly but carefully, deliberately, and allowing some things to let go. 

The last few weeks have pushed me into new territory of which I am still figuring out what it is and what it means but it is exciting.

The following is the progression of the painting above; it is after a Russian artist of Christ in the Wilderness but I have placed the valley and mountains from San Miguel below rather than the city of Jerusalem.  It is oil on paper, loose, quick,done in two days.

“The true work of art is born for the ‘artist’: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation.  It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.”

-Kandinsky