Ironic Butterfly Takes Flight

This blog is a bit like whispering into space for me. I rarely write, and creativity has been scraping an empty barrel lately. That said, I found it a bit ironic that my last post in November had a butterfly winging its way to freedom as part of the found freedom in the anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin wall. The irony, of course, was that my first creative jaunt back was to decorate a butterfly. Decorating with the 13 layer collage technique is addictive to me, as it starts with a tabula rasa of gesso. Then, that layer gets textured in any way that is pleasing to the hands and eye. Then we add in colors, as many or as little as needed; like a recipe, they are chosen to our taste. The colors soon start to disappear with image addition, then that all starts to blur as we stamp with found objects in ink and paint and then do the same with stamps. Will all those additions to image and texture, we add blur; blending in edges with tissue or textured paper or fluffing them out with white paint. Then, time for the fluid acrylics. They are like a pepper or pungent spice that make or break the whole piece. Using them almost stops my heart, and I stand at the ready with a wet rag to mop up destruction. At some level, though, the fluid is the part that forces us to let go...of expectations, and plans, of areas of beauty, and even of parts destroyed; to let go and trust that the process will carry us on. Once the fluids are down, it is time for a hint of transfer in gold or copper or opalescence. Then perhaps, writing goes down or else assemblage. Finally the edge is done all around, in a boundary color like Payne's Gray.  The technique is acquired and refined over time.

I am so very glad I learned it, simply to take a writing class with Nick Bantock in 2009.  He, quite correctly, used to make the writers do art and the artists write. Clever to engage the quiescent brain, as it has so much to say. The process is the heart of the art. It draws you in, and time flows effortlessly without any notice of its passing. The process is an enraptured state; watching for what is beautiful and harmonious and noting what keeps emerging. The emergence of the horses in this piece was profound for me and unconsidered until the piece was done. I suddenly found myself contemplating the losses of two other horses in 2012 and 2014, which broke my heart. Here suddenly are spirit horses...out of nowhere, out of somewhere. Their arrival startled me as did the odd image of a young horse head starting to emerge at the base of the right wing horse's neck. That was not an image at all, but rather a creation that came out of some juncture of inking and stamping and texturing all on its own. It came out of the intersection of the I-Thou relationship, which is necessarily out of spirit. Art comes up at you, just like that.

So, I will now watch for a young horse, perhaps one is growing older as we speak, just for me. I notice how much Lost Shoe cabin came in- literally in bits and pieces from its grounds and in content with the horses who would have drawn the logs up the mountain and the single boot that predated the one that was lost in the cabin's construction. Lost Shoe was the colors and a whisper of the West in this piece. The word California was found in the ripped shreds pile, along with a notation about water resources, just as we ration and go through our worst drought. Spirit, ever present, ever mysterious. So, here to the right is White Horses at Lost Shoe, my mixed media collage donated to the Butterfly Effect, an art for social change organization that drops the butterfly in a public scavenger hunt and then gifts the finder's favorite charity with $250 dollars. The process unfolds down the pane as it did across time spurts over a few weeks. A process of joy and gratitude and expanding blessings.
For more on the butterfly project, see: www.butterflyeffectbethechange.com