"Orange presence"

I came back to a piece called "Orange presence" this evening drawing from a dream of a few nights ago in which the richest layered deep colores of orange arose out of the dream field...

I was feeling still there was more there after two previous approaches... I began playing with the drawing tools beyond the familiar playing with layers and transparencies and erasing, cutaways, etc... I needed play time with absolutely no idea what I was doing, almost blindly feeling my way through the strokes on computers trackpad... seemingly so far from the the inspiration for my work which is somatic, liminal, embodied experience and waking and sleeping dreaming in which the poetic mind flows...

Then I remembered something, after waking from the dream of orange, at sunrise, I was in the kitchen, it is a garden kitchen, that while it is enclosed, is is only partially so, almost half of it is glass and being there is to be very in touch with the elements. Suddenly, the most extraordinary orange light filled the kitchen, flooding, or more like, bathing my retina and mind awareness with the most extraordinary sense of calm, pleasurable joy, refulgent, and juicy with life.

This gave me the clue I needed for the third approach, for the new image, to the abstract play, I introduced images, moving out of the apparently entirely abstract. As in many of my images, if I stay with them, in the moment or over days, they unfold, meanings become apparent and a teaching unfolds.  I call the process "tending the images" as a way of working with soul.

This image "Orange presence" has something to do with the omnipresence of this essential quality suffusing the above and the below, and the spectrum of light of the ordinary, the tangible. There it was in my kitchen as I prepared tea and oatmeal, just as deep and even deeper than in the dream. Finally only very subtle elements of the underdrawing are actually visible...

I love this apparently "grounding" process when spirit becomes tangible, inhabits a form and a story, departs, if temporarily, the abstract All, but is in no way trapped there, simply shining through it all, as we do in this life, in this particular body, in this particular place at any given moment.