ain't nothin easy...

Sheesh.  Thought I'd be so efficient and blog this morning.

My daughter's google account seems to have kidnapped my blog.  Weird.  Rich fixed it on this computer, while the laptop was fine.  But now the laptop, which WAS fine, is doing what the this one did.  But now, I've uploaded the photos on the laptop, dropbox is playing hOudini, and why would the laptop ask for Rich's google ID for iphoto?

Do you get it?  Me neither!

--------------------OK.  That was yesterday.  This is today.-------------

I watched an AMAZING video while exercising this morning.  Michael Jr. - How Comedy Works.

It was more than a good laugh... and I highly recommended laughing while doing knee lifts.  That was funny in itself.

He talks about giving, but I won't give away his punchline.  Just go to youtube and type in that title.  You don't have to exercise, just watch it!  :)

At any rate, he inspired me not to give up.  So...I decided not to give up and try this again.

I have a plan of sorts:  Work on the suede skirt.  See, I'm not God.  His plans are perfect.  Mine are just experiments.  So don't look for perfect parallels here, OK?  I can't handle that kind of pressure.

I'm just me.   

I found myself last session forgetting the lessons my first and best art teacher, Jeannie Maddox, taught us.  For out first painting, she only allowed us to use primary colors and white - no black or premixed colors.  She taught us to see the depth of color even in shadows.  So, while I used some yellow ocre, I also squirted out my greens, reds and blues and yellows today... eventually.

The edges are messy, but that's totally not a problem.

 When I used just my browns, I was focusing on texture.

Then, I began to add color, even the texture became highlighted.  

 I often paint the back ground first, to set the scene and help me with contrast.  But I knew I should wait until I was done with the texture and pouncing before I dropped "Camille" into her setting.

This morning, I'm thinking of how long I had to wait before God brought me here to my own green setting.  There was a lot of pouncing and character building that needed to be done in me first, or I would have caused others near me to be pounced just because they we close by.  (Ever been wounded by the emotional shrapnel of the bomb that went off in someone else's life?  Yeah.  Me too.)  If God had placed me here, before the pouncing, there would have been a lot of messiness that didn't belong in this setting.  I'm glad he waited.

Slowly, the skirt came into focus.

It's not done yet, but it IS a safe time for the background.

 And this is where the story comes in.  I finished this just before Rich came home.  I was painting under stress to get done, reach my goal, give him a "Tah Dah for today" view.  If you compare this to the earlier images, you'll see I had painted the skin tones of the neck and hand.  I didn't know how to handle this. By leaving the suggestion of skin, the portrait of the dress became a decapitated head.  Disturbing.  I plan to come back and leave a slight suggestion of the neck and hand, but first I had to paint out all but the outfit.

But here's the weird thing.  I painted over the skin tones, fixed dinner and then looked through our kitchen pass at the painting.

It's always a good idea to step away and get perspective.

What I saw was an accidental face where the face would be if I had chosen to paint one.  In the mottled background, much like a face in the clouds, was the face of a very sad girl.  Maybe this was a subconscious thing, because as I've been painting this, I've been praying for a girl in New York.

Are you familiar with a thing called intercessory prayer?  Sometimes God plants an image or a name in your imagination/mind to pray for.  I've been the recipient of people praying for me without having met me.  It was at a pivotal crisis time in my life.  Their prayers, and finding out about them, totally saved me from making a HUGE mistake.  That's a story for another day, but I began to pray for this girl.

(If she's only my imagination, then there's no harm done.  Maybe imagining her will provide the inspiration for the story within this garment.  But if she DOES exist and I DON'T pray, then she and I have both missed out on something precious and possibly life changing.)

Prayers aside, I was a little unnerved to see that haunting face.  Not at all what I wanted in that spot.  I wanted LIGHT filtering into the moment through beautiful early fall colors.

I had Rich come stand where I was.  I asked him if he saw a face above the dress.  He looked and said, "Whoa.  That's a little creepy.  It looks like a skull type head looking at her."  I said, "What?  I just see her looking down sadly.  See?"  Then I pointed out where she was.

But Rich didn't see that face till I showed him.  He'd been looking at the top left corner.  He showed me where he was looking.  It was creepy.  Naturally, I wanted to get rid of it.  So I immediately went and painted fresh new green over both areas starting with the darker, stronger greens to obliterate these rather disturbing images.  I let it dry and all I could see were other disturbing images with different features.

I wondered if maybe the sci-fi series I'd just watched - which was a bit dark toward the end - had filtered its way into my painting.  But, no matter why, it needed to be gone!

"Lord, what do I do?"

Use light.

So I went for straight white with a bit of yellow and made my first pass of several to come over the two areas.  It was the only thing that worked.

Later, at pillow talk, I said to Rich, "You know what I realized?  You can't get rid of darkness by adding more darkness.  It just changes form, but stays dark.  Only light gets rid of darkness."

The painting still needs more light.  It's a process.  But I know the answer.

I Thessalonians 5:5  For you are all children of light, children of the day.

©2015 Lydia D. Crouch