Yesterday I hated her.  She was ugly and she was driving me nuts.  This morning I decided I was going to ignore her and maybe look at her later this afternoon.  But she called out to me softly and helped me finish.  She was going to be sad and shedding a tear but she told me that wasn't what she wanted.  She looks peaceful and content to me and in the end...I love her.

So we come to the end of week three in our BIG Fearless Painting journey.  It hasn't been easy and really hasn't even been that fun, what it has been is a BIG push out beyond my own boundaries.  And so far the journey has been well worth it.

Here are a couple more pages out of my Teesha Moore inspired art journal.  I made the journal after watching her You Tube videos which I found very inspiring.  What I like about these pages is that I wasn't trying to make pretty art.  I was just trying to push my own creative boundaries, to think in a way I haven't before when looking at my art journal.

This is my week two project for Connie Hozvicka's "BIG" painting class over at the Dirty Footprints Studio and what led up to it and creating it really was an amazing experience.  I started meditating about three months ago.  I mostly use guided meditation because I find it very hard to shut my mind down so guided meditations are great because they involve my mind but in a directed way.  I have to say mediation has changed my life and I would recommend it to anyone.

So this week I decided to try a new meditation practice called "sohum".  Basically as you inhale you say so and as you exhale you say hum.  Very simple...amazing results.  The very first time I tried this form of mediation I had a vision, maybe not really a vision but I simply don't know what else to call it.  I saw plain as day a frame with a single large eye in the bottom of it.  This was actually at the very beginning of my mediation and when I least expected to have any such experience, but I think that is always the way, we never experience it when we expect to.  Anyway, once I finished meditating and had time to reflect on the image I saw I realized it was a sign to me that I need to be open to and follow my intuition.  I am quite intuitive but at the same time very analytical (not sure exactly how that happened but anyway...) so I can talk myself out of a lot.  But lately I have been actively trying to grow my intuition and not question or stifle it.  So I decided the memory I wanted to paint was this because I never, ever want to forget that vision or its message.

So the painting below is what came out of it.  It is ugly and messy and it flowed out of me like nothing I have ever painted before.  There wasn't a moment of hesitation and the second it was done I knew it.  I think this will be a great reminder for the weeks, months and maybe even years to come to trust myself.  It was a very powerful moment for me.

I have been reading the novel "The Mists of Avalon".  It is an amazing book, one of the best fiction novels I have ever read.  It is one of those books that is so good when you look up from it you don't expect to find yourself in your living room because it seems so real.  I felt inspired to do a painting of two of the characters from the book.  Morgaine, the priestess to the pagan Goddess and Gwenhwyfar, the Christian Queen.  Two more opposite women could not be found yet they both pursue life with intense conviction.  So here is my tribute painting to the strong, courageous albeit fictitious women.  I am really happy with how it turned out, as a matter of fact I may scan it and offer prints of this once I open up my etsy shop next month.  They may not speak to anyone else the way they do to me but you never really know.

As I mentioned before on my blog I am taking Connie Hozvicka's BIG course over at the Dirty Footprints Studio.  I have been planning to take the course for about three months, waiting anxiously for registration to open.  I was even one of the first four who registered when she had an early registration offer.

I just had a feeling that this course was going to change my life.  So now the course has opened and on Sunday I did my first couple of FEARLESS painting exercises and that was fine but after that I was struggling, I didn't want to watch the videos, didn't want to do the exercises.  I was still painting and drawing other things but I was fighting painting BIG.  Finally yesterday when I was really honest with myself I realized that I had set really high expectations for this course.  Maybe they were so high that even Connie couldn't get me to where I had dreamed I wanted to be not because she isn't amazing, because she is, but maybe the expectations were simply beyond reason.  How could anything live up to them.  So subconciously I think I decided that if I just didn't do the work then the course couldn't let me down, it was my choice not to do it.

Even though I had figured out this was exactly what was going on in my head actually doing something about it was very difficult, it took me until 7:30 last night to finally pull out the paint and brushes and actually do one of the assigned exercises.  I think it was the perfect exercise for where my head was at, it was flowy and soft and when I finally showed up my painting met me where I was.  So for now I think I have pushed past this hurdle, I am sure more will surface as I go through the FEARLESS painting process but for now I feel ready to tackle it head on.

Below is my FEARLESS, BIG flow painting.

Today marks the start of "BIG" over at Dirty Footprints Studio.   I am so excited, almost too excited I am afraid.  You see I have this idea that this course is going to change my life, not just my artistic life but my real life as well.  I am not sure I can even explain why I feel this way but I do.  What makes me a little afraid is that when I usually come into something with such high expectations I am almost always disappointed, but I am not going to worry about that now.  I am just going to paint big and fearless and let this journey take me where it will.  No worry, no doubt, just letting the paint flow.  

Below is a fearless painting that I did last weekend.  I had painted the background over a month ago when I was playing with the new fiber paste I had bought but I had no idea what I wanted to do on top of it.  Last weekend I decided to paint a face.  I had done quite a few faces but never have I just picked up my brush and painted one.  I always draw them out first so I can make them pretty, but this time I just picked up the brush and went with it.  She isn't perfect, here face is lopsided (my husband nicely suggested perhaps she has the mumps) and the texture I had been playing around with underneath kind of looks like acne.  I was tempted to try to "fix" her, paint more hair over the lopsided part of her face but the more I looked at her the more she told me that just like all of us she is perfect just the way she is.  She doesn't need to conform to conventional ideas of beauty.  So I didn't fix her instead I gave her the name, she is Sandy.  I don't know why that is her name but it is.