Painting Again

Painting again.

The process is more important than the result, perhaps a metaphor for life.

Abstractions, bright colors, very wet raw canvas. I paint while sitting on the floor. My hands, arms, legs, and feet wear drops of splattered colors. Painting is almost like meditation. Quiet the mind and feel the colors. Some canvases are cursed. Tortured. Then something magical happens and they come alive. Or not.

Feeling the canvas, wetting it with a spray bottle filled with water, dropping paint and spreading it with my hands. Tasting the colors in my mind - synesthesia. Tasty orange - yellower than tomato red, a color that pulses and vibrates and feeds the soul. Still searching for the ultimate purple. Frustrated when it comes out a shade too red or a little too grey.

I need more implements. Not brushes. Odds and ends, sticks and strings, plastic twist-ties. Chopsticks! I need to mix the paint with something to make it foam and react on its own. Bromo-seltzer, perhaps. Do they still make that? I love how it makes the paint fuzz and bubble and move of its own accord . Peeling dried acrylic paint off of the mixing cup and stretching it, applying pieces of it to a still-wet canvas to shock and add texture.

Sensuous, alive. Painting makes me feel whole again.