I’m busy with a couple of competing things, today, or that’s what my distracted mind is saying just now (“then just STOP! Re-focus!” says my inner mentor). A friend posted a series of photographs, earlier, that sparked an inspiration to paint, based upon two or three of them. Her son, strolling on the beach, distant squalls making a looming sky, curtains of heavy rain and sharp lines of bright light from waves and lens flare.
I’ve grabbed some acrylic paint and brushes and the remaining blank pages of a sketchbook and made a fast study of the fluttering and shifting images in my memory, like catching a falling leaf under waving wind-blown trees, crushing the pristine form of the airborne leaf in my efforts to grasp it.
I must clean the palette of rapidly dried paint, brushes too, attend to whatever else seems so important, then return to this later.. perhaps in oils. For now, I have something; the effort to mix and apply paint has helped give a muscle-memory to the vision. What will result? It’s uncertain but I have a starting point, a seed to plant.
………..
Postscript:
Twenty years ago today, I was also painting: walls and ceilings of a friend’s house in which I was to live for several years, a happy home. I was called through to the living room to see the breaking news from New York, in time to witness the live broadcast of the second plane strike the second tower. It was shocking .. and clear then that it was not an accident. I had a feeling, then, of some seismic processes stirring.
I send out wishes for healing and rest from pain for all those who suffered then and since.
Best wishes to you all.
Chris Terrell 