Wrestle with it, even if uncertain

What to make of my sabbatical.  I have an idea about my painting but not a complete concept, not a complete plan or design.  How does one incorporate intense joy and deep sadness into art as the Luminous Darkness?  I want to wrestle with it and see where it goes even if uncertain.

As I washed the altar on the night of Maundy Thursday, I was in that moment preparing for death, all the deaths I have known: the people, the little deaths of life, and my own death – and Jesus’ death.

I poured the water on the five crosses on top of the altar marking the five wounds of Christ, and with white towels prepared it for this day, prepared the tomb, prepared the body, washing away the dust of the journey, waiting, hoping, grieving, believing.  Let the mystery do its work.  Let Jesus happen.

What happens if I produce only one painting? Or none?  What if it takes me into my own dark night of the soul?  What will it look like?  To not only look at darkness, deep sadness, but intense joy as well, to see beyond and into the depths and try to express the complexity of life and the trajectory of where I/we are wanting to be.  I want it to be authentic, imperfect, beautiful, tugging on my heart of joy and sorrow.

I am nervous about putting out there the information about my sabbatical and what I hope to focus on: Art and the Luminous Darkness.  How to make sense of it?  How to give it life in me?  To find the voice for it?  I know I am less interested in another pretty picture than I am in allowing my soul work and my experience of the work around me find expression through my art.  A certain yearning.  Grateful yet an itch that remains.  A longing that will never be completely satisfied but with which one comes to peace with, at least on some level.  Yet expression of that intense joy as well, beyond words, beyond complete description.

I love taking paint to canvass, the feel of the paint, the color, the smell, the unknowing, watching it come to life – that moment when just the right stroke says what you wanted to say sometimes when you did not even know it for sure.  Then there it is; out of a whole painting that one stroke that carries the satisfaction of purpose.  It is the turn of phrase, the silence in the score.  You know it is there and you are amazed at how it works even if no one else sees it.

Authentic art.  What is it?  What makes one piece priceless or hung or collected and another stacked in a thrift store?  What creates longing?  What causes the “ah” or the desire to revisit a painting like a dear friend?  To stand in front of it and ache?  What is it?

Is it the look over a shoulder, the look back, or recognition, of regret, of joy and grief revisited?  Not propaganda or an attempt at manipulation but it can have a story or a moment or simply an authentic emotion.  Birth, love, death.  Spring, winter, fall, summer?  God?  To what end?  Perhaps needing/wanting a compass, a direction for my art, to have some sense of why I am doing what I am doing, I find myself asking the questions.

“From the waters of chaos you drew forth the world, and in your great love, fashioned us in your image.”

Perhaps it will be discovered in the doing.  I’m not sure what this journey will bring.  Perhaps it will take me to somewhere I have already been but different.  I know I feel alive when I paint; when I create.  Enter that.  Don’t be afraid of it.

Oscar Wilde once said “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”