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!