Category: Uncategorized

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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Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways.

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal

Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble.  Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com

You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

I’ve uploaded some new photographs in my Redbubble shop, so they are available on cards, prints, shirts, and some other things.

Click this link to get to my shop. A lot of my art is on prints and cards, if you’re interested.

Thanks!

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Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways.

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal

Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble.  Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com

You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

Mourn the loss, celebrate the memory.

You can’t avoid it, especially as you age. We all have a date with that mysterious ending, that graduation off the earth and into the great beyond. And it’s not just old people who die, the young are taken by disease, accidents, violence, drugs and any number of unexpected reasons. And yet it’s often socially unacceptable to talk about it, about death, about loss, about ongoing grief.

As I cope with my degenerative disease, along with the death of friends, I forget to mourn the losses I’ve felt within my own body. I seem to get comfortable with one transition, then another comes along and I must adjust to loss of powers I continue to foolishly believe I will keep. I try to buck-up and carry on. But lately I’ve realized that’s unhealthy. I need, we all need, to mourn and sit with losses, both internal and external.

So, I’ve been working on this poem. I finally got it worded in a way that expresses my feelings, but I wanted to illustrate it. It took me a long time to figure out how, and I fear my illustration has made it illegible, so I’ve typed it out for you.

Grief

by Joy Murray

It’s like a bullet shot too close to the heart to remove.  You sense the cruel steel of it, though doctors say you can’t possibly feel it anymore, it’s all in your head. But it’s in every beat, bruised over and over by the cold reality embedded inside you.

Or it’s like a splinter that goes deeper the more you try to release it. You wince and struggle to get it to the surface, but it’s stronger than you, this slender blade, this tender pain.

But sometimes it’s like a beam of light. You suddenly see the dust and chaos built up around you. A forgotten song plays in your mind. You clean your house. Memories flood around you through a prism, each flicker of color like a lost memory dancing.

I love it best when it comes in the middle of a hot and restless night, wraps its cool arms around me and whispers to my soul, I am here. I am here. I never left. And I finally understand, even in my deepest pain, what is eternal and growing within me – astounding, expanding, infinite.

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I hope when grief sends you reeling out of your sense of security, or even when it creeps up on you years later, you welcome it with whatever power you can. Cry, bore others with your stories, stay awake all night reminiscing. Love again. Never love again. Sit with your feelings, embrace your grief, your memories — feelings that are precious and priceless.

~~~

Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways.

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal

Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble.  Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com

You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

I’ve been working mostly in acrylic painting for the past 8 years, but I always keep some watercolor around because it’s easy to start and clean up. Plus, it works well with drawing. I also like the unpredictable nature of it.

I was looking through a journal from 2016, when I was working only in ink and watercolor, and I found this. It made me want to get back into it a little more. I love the way the colors drip into one another, and the contrast between loose colors and tight lines. What do you think?

The the brownish red in the original was painted with Daniel Smith’s red fuchsite paint, made from the gemstone, and has a soft iridescence to it that’s subtle and lovely.

~~~

Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways.

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal

Cards and prints of some of my art is available on Redbubble.  Also T-shirts and stickers and other odds and ends. When you click an image, in the lower right hand corner you’ll find a link to all the various products that these are printed on. If you have any trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know. joyzmailbox@gmail.com

You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.