Towards the end of last year, a friend commissioned a painting as a gift for her sister, Cindy Arp, a columnist for KnoxTNToday.com, a news site for Knoxville, Tennessee. She is a tree lover like me, and also an avid hiker.

I never know when I start a painting what direction it will take. It’s an odd form of inner communication between my ideas, the way things look on the canvas, my skills as a painter, and the inspirations of everyday life.

These days, I often use canvas to wipe my brushes on instead of a cloth, then I squirt the paint with water and manipulate it a little bit. I don’t always want to start with a blank white canvas. In this case, I’d already had a canvas with some colors smeared on it. So I did some more deliberate color washes, letting the colors bleed into one another.

I find this method loosens up my imagination if I’m stuck for ideas, which has been happening a lot lately, but that’s another story.

My studio is in my bedroom so I position the canvas where I can see it when I first wake-up, and thus begins a communication process between me and the painting. I knew I wanted a forest, so this is how it developed.

At this point, my plan was to add some plants to the grassy areas under the trees and paint a hiker on the trail. But then Cindy wrote this article, Stardust and a Dose of Quantum Mechanics, on how we are all stardust, and I was so impressed by it, I began painting an interpretation of stardust, and the communication between the earth, the sky, and each of us hiking our life path. I didn’t take anymore process pictures, but this is the final painting:

It’s as much a mystery to me, as it probably is to you, how a painting goes from what I start with to the finished work. I always like that the colors of the original tinted canvas peek through the finished painting.

I enjoyed painting this very much. The stardust was there from the beginning, but it took reading Cindy’s article for me to really see it and let it shine through. She was kind enough to send pictures of how it looks on her wall — the stardust really comes to life there.

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