I made it to one deadline – MFA’s Winter Member Juried Competition- literally at the last minute. The gallery director was leaving at 6 pm – and I got there to enter my painting at 5:55.
Painting all those little birds — 11 in all — really paid off, because they provided me with great practice. I was creating this painting with palette knives (the underpainting as well), adding an acrylic skin of a portion of a bird’s nest at the bottom, with decorative paper here and there, and stamps with a flourish…and then a bird simply called out to be put on the canvas. Not the smaller songbirds I had been painting, but a more dramatic rose-breasted grossbeak. He and the branch simply flowed off my brush; it was almost an other-worldly experience, like my hand was being guided. As a spiritual person, and I have to say that something more powerful than I created that bird.
And I believe that even more because the painting was selected by the juror to be in the show. This bird has a message for me…
The painting is called “I Rule.” He just looks like he is the ruler of all he surveys; elephants and nests and trees and berries galore — and mysteries yet to be discovered.
Okay then – I made it! Now there is another deadline tomorrow: Art On Paper, a national juried exhibition, also through the MFA. Wish me luck!
