I did some drawing while we were in Iceland, but since we came home, I haven’t really had the urge to paint. It’s not the landscapes weren’t inspiring, quite the opposite.
I’ve been trying to decide how to watercolor it as it was, but careful lines — even impressionistic dabs in those lines — seem in adequate for capturing the power and life Mother Earth shared with us last week. How do you capture the essence of a mother who shows you her stretch marks that cross the place we know as the Land of Fire and Ice as she lets you know she’s having hot flashes, who doesn’t care how many billion years old she is she’s gonna wear any damn color she wants, and who seemed a bit pissed because her children are fighting over and even wrecking the riches she has given?
Then last night I remembered the “Reckless Abandon” my art instructor, painter Marianne Mitchell, introduced me to early in July. It seemed like the only way to get back to — and hopefully share — the emotion of looking into geysers and feeling their force as they explode or standing at the edge of a waterfall almost the size of Niagara Falls, knowing only a thin thread a rope keeps you from falling in. This is where starting with reckless abandon led this morning…