With joy I enter this next blog! It is, after all, about the messiness of life, which is best reflected (as far as I’m concerned) within the analogy of painting, color and the like. (No surprise there!)

As I ventured to the Google images browser, I found it strange how very few truly messy paint photos there were for the taking. Amazing, actually. (People must find messy paint distasteful!) I do admit that messy paint in the wrong places does not work... but one must make a place for mess, don’t you think??

Take household bills and mail for one example. Honestly, who can stand it? There must be a messy place to store all those un-faced decisions. And what about salad dressings. Most of us just keep them until the dates run out. (Not thinking of you Bonnie- you are the exception to everything I’m saying here!) One would have to actually eat salad on a regular basis to justify the good dressings... so we only buy those for company. And the place for the salad dressings is the right door of the fridge, 2nd shelf. They go there until you buy the real thing you want which is the Hershey’s syrup! Then it’s “by-by cheap Italian”!

So we must admit, mustn’t we, that life requires a bit of controlled mess? Some of us are more OK with that than others. But, there comes a point in everyone’s life- perhaps every 6 months, perhaps only after Christmas, when the messes must be made to go away.
When it is no longer acceptable to keep that dead hamburger and fries in the back seat. When we must face the fray and boldly pitch, organize, clean and make payments on the things that clutter our lives so easily.

Is this not just like a painting?? Tell me? To find mess is to find ideas where they don’t belong, where they say too much or don’t speak at all.

To pitch is to remove from the canvas that which takes away from the message of the picture. The cow in the distance.. is only distracting. Nothing should be able to walk away there. It should be still.. it should give the feeling of non- movement... the feeling of fixation. The cow is clutter. The cow must go.

To organize is to rebuild structure. To recreate in your mind first.
A tree is only able to move by it’s branches and leaves. Make a tree.
Water is confined to is boundaries. A castle is stone, hard, and fixed. And now the one thing that is able to transcend all of these .. a man on a horse. Make him stand, but pensively... controlled. Make the horse appear frustrated. Pull back his head... Make the man be asking something. Make him be controlled only by his own desire to know. Because to know is to be truly free.

To clean- to remove color. since all color surrounds us.. in the light we see by.. in order to see this picture we must remove color. We remove red and yellow and leave blue for water. Remove blue and leave red and yellow for the sunset. Off in the distance there is a blur, a melding of light which happens in real life. No intensity. The farther away a thing is the less we see it. Mountains appear purple, grey. Our experience and our light are now. We see them clearest when they are closest. Time and Distance clean color away for us.

And what about fixing our clutter? Making payments? Making our lives say something good? We add light! We make the trees sway in the breeze by adding light to the leaves. Light on the left and off this way means the sun is catching the backs of the leaves.. your mind will tell you there is wind. The water will move so will the horses’ tail. Light adds movement, direction, texture and shape. The painter simply adds white to the colors he has already on his palette. Light, life, force, wind, movement, doing, being... it’s all the same stuff.

So next time you find yourself with too much mail or some kind of nasty onion rings under the back seat... I say grab yourself a paintbrush!