Feeling Your Way to Creativity

Feel what is within you!

When you look at a rose and think to paint it, might it first make sense to leave behind the mechanics of painting and instead, look within your heart about how the presence of the rose makes you feel?
The emotions that you possess about what it is that you are experiencing—this is the gold we mine when we create.

For the heart is where all that is beautiful flows from! Without the awareness you bring to the rose, it is simply petals and color that will bloom and then fall to the ground. The rose is made real by your experience of it. Keeping in touch with that as you paint––this is where real connections are made!

If we think of painting a subject as akin to meeting someone it will change how we go about it. If when we met someone, we only studied their shape and their color and their value, but never made eye contact, never listened to what they had to say or appreciated their wise silence––one might conclude that perhaps we had missed the real magic and the real essence of this soul altogether 😉

The same can be said for painting the things that we are drawn to—whether it be a rose, a cat, or a blue garden door in Provence. We must become intimate with these things by becoming aware of the feelings they evoke within us. By being in awe of their rugged feel, their velvety softness, or incredibly delicate ways we allow for their essence to become realized.

We must allow the heart to get involved first. We can then let it lead the way in expressing on canvas our emotional response to the world around us!

Mechanics, as applied to creativity, are simply…mechanics. We may do piano drills over and over. We may study composition and do thumbnail sketches to improve. We may exercise and stretch our muscles so that we may do a perfect pirouette but here’s the deal. After all of that, or perhaps before all of that, we must first feel the music, feel the rose, feel the dance. When we respond to what we feel and make it visible on the canvas, on the dance floor, and on the piano— we touch the face of god!

Note: The painting shown here was a doorway in a small village in Provence. It was a door that entered into a garden. It beckoned all sorts of magical, secret garden whisperings in my heart. It was elegant with age (something I want to be!) It was a doorway that held promise. I painted this many months after ‘our’ encounter. It was like recalling a magical cafe interlude with a stranger. It’s what makes painting so much more than a mechanical adventure 😉

‘Come Into the Garden’, 9 x 12 Oil on Panel, Available as a Fine Art Print in Dreama’s Shop

P.S. My heart was so touched by the comments left on my last post. I am truly blessed to have so many wonderful people (like you!) in my life. Seriously. Love is real and good words are like a lavender breeze on a sunny afternoon …in Provence 😉

P.S.S. So happy to say that Janie H is our winner for our 10th Anniversary Giveaway!! Congratulations! And thanks to each of you for joining in on the celebratory fun 🙂