Personal
Space
“I paint
my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need
to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other
consideration.”
Frida
Kahlo
The painters have finally finished in my house. Black dog Liza has a white side from running down the
hallway too close to the wall. There is a new dog-door on the screen-porch
that none of the pack will go through because it's, well...spooky, I
guess. Ah, well, at least everything looks nice and clean and empty.
There's nothing quite
like an empty canvas, or an empty wall that calls to us without
giving us a single clue as to what to do with it. I don't know about
you, but I have a hard time deciding what goes where. It has to come
of its own volition through intuition, and not through thinking. My
home is very important to me, as I'm sure yours is to you. My
environment cannot be someone else's work. So it takes a while to
recalibrate after a big change—for me and, apparently, for the
dog-pack, too.
Like Frido Kahlo, we
create our own reality; one that speaks of our needs and likes
and gives us comfort. In essence, we paint our personal habitat. We
may not be artists applying colors to canvas as she was, but we are
none-the-less creators of art. We paint with bedspreads, and
curtains, and pots and pans, with tools and technology. We spread
things, and hang things, and place things, and before we know it,
we've created a masterpiece out of all the old familiar things we
love. Voila—home!
In the words of Jackson
Pollock, “Every good painter paints what he is.” Our outer
world is a reflection of our inner world. Since humans were
hunter-gatherers, we have created home. When we had to carry it on
our backs, or drag it on sleds, or pack it into wagons, we took both
the accouterments essential to life and the ones that simply gave us
joy. One for the body, one for the soul. Like Kahlo, we do that
because we need to.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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