Where did this come from?
It’s in the drum skin.
Sure you are not just making this up?
Always a risk. I am looking for what is looking back at me, but I am also aware that the mind wants to fill in lost and found edges.
Lost edges? Really? What does this mean?
Art speak. The mind completes unclear areas, joins up broken lines, names something and then
makes it so. So I think I see a fox head, and then the edge of a nose from the edge of an ear, and my mind fills in details, and at some point I am looking for an animal and a human face together.
Naming it makes it so. One of my favorite phrases. Explains much of the human condition.
I start calling the painting, “shapeshifter” which encourages a different kind of looking.
It enables seeing.
Huh. Now you sound like an art teacher.
Looking is a biological imperative for navigation, security, survival, Seeing is a luxury that requires slowing the eye down and insisting on gradual inspection. The name shapeshifter enables the
possibility of a shared body as well as a face. And there they are!
Foot, Claw. Hand, Paw.
You are becoming embarrassing. First this image is beyond weird, now you are speaking in rhyme. Plus you are writing this in a blog you plan to make public.
Get over yourself.
Shamanism and art sit in a space of veils and mist, of glimpses that disorient as much as reveal. Both move me through a space between what I already know and what I have not yet experienced.
The initial use of yellow pigment was lost in the drumskin tone, and the urge for something different became undeniable. I started painting the blue pigment, timidly at first, away from the edges, and suddenly the surface came to life. There is no pigment inside the human form; only the outside rim and the facial features are painted, everything else is the drum itself.
When a drum image is true, whatever this means, there is a loss of comfort,
a heightened awareness, unexpected discoveries.
There is a journey.
All this is about the drum painting, so why begin the post with an image that is not the painting?
Because a drum journey leaves the responsibility of choices and actions with me. A journey on the drone of a drum does this more by unveiling mystery, than by offering advice or providing answers.
I have to choose to follow paths, even when I am not sure how the experience will unfold. Just as a reader of this blog had to open a story that did not appear to have a matching image and topic. I think journeys, and drum paintings, are better when salted with a small amount of risk.
