acrylic & wire on canvas, 30 x 30 inches

For the past four years, I’ve been snagging every opportunity I can to attend workshops and seminars and talk to individuals knowledgeable about indigenous tradition and tribal medicine wheels. The learning I have encountered is a big influence on the colors I choose to work with in my paintings and wall sculpture creation.

One of my favorite teachers is Sobonfu Somé, a very powerful healer and teacher from the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, West Africa. In her tradition, the medicine wheel is made up of five elements: fire, water, earth, mineral and nature. Each element is connected not only to specific meaning and focus, but is also related to each calendar year. 2008 is a nature year, and nature is all about magical transformation, stepping into your truth and losing the masks you wear that hide your inner light. Not surprisingly, green is the color associated with this element.

Last year was a fire year, and fire is about vision and connecting with our ancestors. Red is the color for fire, and in terms of a balanced wheel, people need three times the amount of water in their charts to balance out fire.

As an artist, my vision is very valuable and important to my creative process. It is sometimes difficult to describe how my ideas reveal themselves to me and unfold as I work them through. Often, I can see in my mind’s eye a vision or picture of an item, like a canvas of a particular shape and size, or a material, like a weathered section of wood with lots of texture and color variation. I find myself drawn to craft stores and thrift shops, sometimes unexpectedly, where I often find unusual items or materials I need that just happen to be on sale.

One of my girlfriends calls this “psychic shopping.” However it works, I do find myself guided, very often step-by-step, in my creative process. And this is most true when it comes to color. I find myself dreaming and thinking about a specific color or color combination. And when I am in a store looking at a wall of colors, I can feel myself drawn to specific hues and tones. So it is really a law of attraction for me … I am pulled to the colors that I NEED to work with. And therefore, my projects and creations are really a true reflection of where I am in my own process of life.

I’m no different from any other artist in this respect. Every creative person is attracted to and involved in projects that somehow support the “sorting through” of whatever aspect of life he or she is wrangling with. So for me, painting is not necessarily a “want to” kind of endeavor, though I certainly enjoy it tremendously. Painting for me is a “have to.” I have to paint to be happy. I have to play with color, texture, sizes, shapes and various materials. Like the wire in “Convergence” showcased at the beginning of this blog … I just couldn’t resist the urge to play with the wire over the solid panel of red. And what a dynamic piece this becomes when shown with a spotlight to accentuate the shadows of the twists and turns of the wire!

So maybe there is, as they say, some method to my creative “madness.”