Mini Musings
Creating art invites me to exist entirely in the present. In a space where past and future fade away. I find clarity and awareness. Each piece I create becomes an exploration of what it means to be fully in this moment.
The pieces I work on are generally created over time. A song or an album strikes me with creativity in a moment. From there I will start the looping process. I play the song over and over analyzing what it means to me, the listener, and to the musician, the creator. Sometimes I create the palette of inks in a very literal way. The song has lyrics of love and I’ll choose inks like beets, roses, cherries or red cabbage. Other times it’s the emotion that the instrumentation brings to me. It may feel mysterious so I go with ranunculus or morning glory, even though the song has nothing to do with mystery.
I’ve been playing around with the size of my pieces lately. I generally work on 8”x8” cold-pressed watercolor paper. I had a block of the same paper in 4”x6” that I was using to create cards for friends, and I’ve enjoyed the small workspace. What can I condense into this tiny area? I enjoyed using multiple pieces to convey a story in Encompassing, but now I was thinking about doing that on a mini scale.
Being in the present moment
I started these mini musings when I was anticipating a tough day. I was sitting in a feeling of dread. This is not where I wanted to be. It’s not my normal state of being. I needed to shake it so I went up to my painting studio and laid out nine 4x6 cards. I brought myself into the painting process. I played music and picked out the inks that connected me with the music. I moved through this part rather quickly. Sometimes it can take me days to find the palette; this took 15 minutes. Each ink i chose has a personality, an energy I draw from. Red cabbage for passion, strawberry for love and sensuality, purple heart for growth — nothing related the feelings of dread I experienced earlier. They’re a reflection of my inner spirit.
The base layer
I looped the song "Slipping Away” by LEISURE. I’ve been really into their 2021 album, Sunsetter. Looping a song over and over while I make a piece becomes a meditation. Each time it loops around or when I revisit it on another day, I uncover new layers of emotion. The music becomes a bridge to the present moment.
I began with a sense of dread, a storm cloud hanging over my day. As the inks mixed on the paper that feeling no longer sat inside of me. It was just me, the music, and the colors. The dread no longer mattered—it simply slipped away, and I found myself absorbed in the flow of creation. Time didn’t matter. Now is all I have.
New layers
As I let the base layer dry, I knew the pieces were incomplete so I left them out on the table. Over the next two weeks, each time I returned to these pieces, I was different—a new moment, a new presence, fresh emotions. The art was shifting and evolving with me. My work is a living, breathing process in the moment I create it and in the moment when you look at it and create your own interpretation of it.
When I returned to the table, sometimes I felt nothing. One time I felt the urge to add another layer of red cabbage to 3 of the pieces, purple heart on 3 others, and strawberry on the last 3. One morning before work I thought about the chorus of the song. “I keep on slipping away. I keep on, keep on, slipping away…” I added an echo of pencil marks to each piece with white and blue colored pencils.
These nine mini musings are about slipping away—not in the sense of losing something, but of releasing it. The moment I created these will never come again. As you look at them you’ll have your own moment of now with them.
