Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

The finished background canvas sat, stood, or hung around the studio for over a year before this lordly image of a Hindu deity appeared in the New York Times last spring. I didn't hook them up right away, but kept the page torn out of the paper, thinking I'd collage it into a separate work, not ruling out the possibility of just taping it to the wall as it was. When I re-organized the studio last summer, the general upheaval brought these two unrelated unfinished objects into close proximity with one another, and synchronicity kicked in. Note to self: save everything no matter what.

more ocean dreams last night.

Painting waves again. Must be this book I'm reading, The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch. An eccentric loner goes to live by the ocean after a busy life in the theatre. He thinks he will write, and he makes a good start of it, but pretty soon the wheels start to come off the bus. I'm reading this really slowly because a) I don't want it to end, and b) it is starting to scare the bejeezus out of me!

Tamsin Barraclough, waiting for spring

Between Two Worlds

Painted this a few weeks ago. I had stopped by our local Panera Bread, which is adjacent to a huge hospital complex, and was just so deeply touched to see this chemo patient in her housecoat in there, looking so haunted and far away, like she was literally existing between two worlds.

Chemo patient

Blue-greenness

Made a terrible mess in the studio this past weekend, sitting on the floor making collages around a specific color theme. I think I'm finally getting past my inner critic. Working with the most basic materials -- acrylic craft paint, rubber stamps, charcoal pencils, and last week's New York Times retrieved from my recycling bin -- seems to get me past the preciousness of working with "good" art materials and frees me up to just create without any assumption about the worth of the outcomes. These collages will get cut up and combined into other things, but I figured I'd scan them first before I started whacking them apart!