In this month of inspiration to bring new visions into outer expression, first I mused on what would feel good to be done with, to clear the field, and in that creative spaciousness got reminded of an enlightenment from long ago. I decided to invoke it in the current moment, not just marvel at it in the rear-view mirror.
When I was very young and unsophisticated about the different ways that people see, I sat as a model for a portrait painting class. During a break, when I was allowed to walk around the arc of easels, I felt a giant empty space open up in the place inside where I’d previously known who I was and what I looked like. Each student had painted a different person.
And I was going to have to choose: my payment for sitting was to be the portrait of my choice.
My parents were also involved. They chose the version that was sweet as peaches, demure, genteel. Even the brush strokes were hyper-controlled. My smile looked confident but kind.
I chose the one with rough strokes, with blurred edges, where energy seemed to be whipping through me, light escaping from my skin and eyes and hair. My smile was rebelliously amused, just about to cause trouble.
I’m embarrassed to report that I was numb to the politics of the situation. The sweet peaches one had been painted by the dear lady who’d invited me to sit, she being a treasured friend of my parents and the teacher of the class. Whether this influenced the style in which she’d painted me, knowing how my parents preferred to see me – or whether my parents would’ve chosen whatever she painted, to be gracious to their friend and respectful of the teacher and the invitation – or whether they were friends because they saw the world and people through the same lenses – or all three, I’ll never know. I imagine I embarrassed them all by choosing the wild portrait. Of course I didn’t say “wild.” I gently took my parents to that artist’s easel to show them my choice. I don’t think it’s an unconscious reinvention to say I remember the artist’s warm smile, the twinkle in her eye. We took both paintings, they hung the sweet one in their living room, and it occurs to me only now to wonder if my parents paid the wild woman for her work.
Now that I’ve recalled this portrait memory, I feel refreshed in publishing a blog post: in a sense, I’m painting a self-portrait, knowing there’s a whole arc of easels out there, painting my words in your own minds with your own palettes and perceptions.
This idea lights up the reality that there are also hundreds of little inner artists painting my own interior screens of impressions of everything – fragments of history, influential personalities near me and far away, interpretive challenges from a hypothetical future, and every bit of every present moment.
This whole topic might seem like useless navel-gazing during a fraught, chaotic time in the public world. Yet for me it’s inventive: every image, inner and outer, of self and world, is art (literal root of imag-ination) – both unique and temporary. A split-second kind of temporary. Listening within for the impulse to paint a more harmonious world (the change one wishes to see) can be the first moment of a new world, first within, then rippling out into others’ experience.
Readers are invited to ponder the photo at the top of this piece and notice how the ripples in the water change the reflection of each bird, how each bird sees the others from a different vantage point, how the movements of their bodies and the motion of the Earth in relation to the reflected setting sun inevitably created a new reality the instant after this image was captured.
photo credit: Laura Schrek via stockxchange