VIO-LA! It is here! Virtues I is the newest Angel in the Angelic Orders series. It took me exactly a month to complete him, as he was initiated on 21 June and that's the exact number of the date in July I finished him. In the last New Moon Newsletter, I had just begun him-at Art in the Garden-and you *might* see some of the elements visible in that photo of the first layer are still existent here!
I've lived with this painting for a month wherein each day he was the only thing I was painting, a month in which I was in a Shakespeare play that demanded all my creative energy yet still I painted him, a month in which I taught a Shakespeare workshop to teenagers yet still I painted him, a month in which I was driven and dogged by doubt and wondered if I'd lost all my painting ability yet still I painted him. He has all sorts of music in him: Jethro Tull The Broadsword and the Beast, Depeche Mode Violator, Poco! Totally weird. He's just weird. My 3-year-old niece Eleanor started the pink squares one day when I needed something, anything, to break up the impasse I was in, to dig a channel out from the shoal on which I felt stranded.
Anyway, I can no longer tell if the painting is 'bad' or 'good', only that he is bright and beautiful, childlike and strange.
That's five out of nine Orders now, I can hardly believe it, the canvases are so massive and the processes of making them so muscular. Stood alongside them in the studio, he fits. He chose himself, it was my job to realize him, and that's the confirmation I need.
Looking ahead: the next New Moon is overnight on August 23rd, so Issue 4 will be arriving ca. then. In the interim, you are invited to visit my website for the Full Moon Blog :) <- the last one: I feel like I have been in with this painting forever! ;o) The world will be even more golden when we meet again, and darker in the early mornings, and the air we breathe will contain within it that first scent and coolness of Fall.
Sending you lots of love and artistry,
Laura
