Light in the darkness

Yesterday I decided I really needed to switch back to hard body acrylics -- I've been using fluid acrylics almost exclusively these last few weeks -- and so I wandered into the studio, pulled out three tubes of paint and put them on the paper palette, but later I changed my mind about the colors and just never got in there to do anything about it.

But today I found some time after lunch, found some tubes in the range I was looking for, and started glomming on the paint with various palette knives; so much fun!

Unfortunately one of the colors I had thought I wanted to use was black, and once it was on the canvas I hated it, so then I tried to paint over the black while it was still wet with some predictably muddy results. So tomorrow, once the paint is dry, I'll redo the upper right corner -- most likely with white -- to cover up the mess there.

... and now that I've written that, I see the black (which was really gritty, by the way; old tube, I guess) as the reality of death, which I tried to include but clearly wanted to cover up. No surprises there!

To me the two large bodies of white at the center of this look a bit like hands raised in prayer, so its working title is currently "Uplifted." Interestingly enough, I've always been careful to avoid words like prayer and God and Jesus and Buddha in my other blog, and today that blog, too, seems to offer up a prayer -- in that case, in the hands of an iris.

The urge to prayer is also not surprising, in light of current events, of course, but there are other factors driving the urge as well: several different uncomfortable email trails have crossed my desk lately -- stuff with work, stuff with friends, nothing to do with the virus -- and a VERY nasty diatribe against boomers came in as a comment on my blog. Luckily my security-savvy husband realized it was spam, deliberately sent to hundreds of other innocent bloggers to further divide the country, and so I added to my already long list of prayers a prayer for all the sweet boomer women who got that nastiness and thought it was from a real person. I suppose I should also pray for whoever wrote such ugly things; it must be hard to live inside that much anger...

Luckily -- if I look at what I paint as an indicator of my subconscious state -- I'd say it looks like some part of me, in spite of all the news to the contrary, seems to believe there is still light; still hope. And though that may just be wishful thinking, I'm still grateful for the sustenance that light brings. May you, too, still be able to access some light even as the darkness looms from all sides...

Learnings: These colors work well for me.
                  This much texture is too busy for me.
                   True black doesn't work all that well in this environment.