08 December 2016

Finding Her Place in the Universe: Our Own Spiritual Journey

2016 was, for all intents and purposes, about finding and reclaiming my true self. As described to a friend, certain landscapes reached this year felt like I witnessed them before birth and I have been making my way back to them ever since. My next mixed media piece symbolizes and illustrates this.

The lapse of time spent working on this piece spanned close to a year. The sunface came first. When I created her in the early part of 2015, I had no idea what would ultimately surround her or where she would end up. The round sunface spent several months sitting in the art studio, watching in silence as I worked on other pieces. Occasionally, I would look into her eyes in search of where she belonged, but to no avail. Then one day, while working on another piece, I had what I like to call a "happy accident" with some acrylic paint mixed with water. Just before I discarded the paper it was on, I thought, "wait a minute," and on a whim, I cut out some triangular shapes. The paint just so happened to go with the paint I had used on the sunface from several months before and these triangular shapes would go on to become the rays around the sunface. By the summer of 2015, the sun was assembled and complete. I placed her on a sheet of white paper, where she remained while the backdrop to the piece came together over the next several months.

Independently of this, I used the same "happy accident" technique to create swaths of blue, black, and purple throughout autumn. What I thought would be the foundation for a different piece ended up serving as the backdrop to this piece. Leftover pieces from a holiday craft project found their way into the piece in January 2016. These strips of blue construction paper with gouache were added to bring intrigue and asymmetry to the composition. The final element emerged in early February. While listening to Gustav Holst's seven-movement orchestral suite, The Planets Op. 32, I was inspired to create planetary bodies out of semi-diluted acrylic paint. With those in place, this sun truly was

"Finding Her Place in the Universe"

From the time we become self-aware, we seek to understand ourselves and to discover our purpose in life and our place in the world. Some step into it with ease, others have to search for it for years, and still others never manage to find it. After years, if not centuries or millennia, this sun has found her place. She has her own corner of the universe that's as unique as she is, where she is safe and accepted, where she has devoted satellites, where she can reach her zenith, where she is free to just be. Through this piece, I began to understand my own place in this vast universe.

Featured in this post: Finding Her Place in the Universe 
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