The Living Artist

“Hope” by Heather Keith Freeman
8″x10″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Image description: A young white girl with long, straight blue hair extends a hand holding a small sphere of light towards the viewer. Behind her, a bifurcated background; dark green and brown on the right, gold and yellow on the left.

Hope.

When all the world is turmoil and doubt, when the despair taints everything we touch and chance thoughts release tears and collapse the fragile scaffolding shielding our bruised souls from a brutal world -

Even then, we can choose. We can choose to turn back to the darkness, stifling in its weight but comforting in its familiarity, or we can choose to take the light offered to us by Hope.

Sometimes the light is too much, it burns our tender skin and rips scabs off of wounds not healed enough to bear the open air – but even then, just to know it is there may be enough to keep the dark from swallowing us whole.

The myth of Pandora has two versions. In one, she opens the box and all the monsters escape to plague humanity, but the bright butterfly of Hope follows them to keep humanity from utter despair. In another, she closes the box just in time to trap Hope inside.

The two versions illustrate our choice, even in the blackest moments. This is not the “just snap out of it” choice offered to us by disinterested professionals and well-meaning but clueless friends. This is the choice that is the fundamental essence of free will, holding the awareness of a different path even if we are not yet ready to set foot upon it. Maybe the spark of Hope is too blinding to reach for, too strange to comprehend, but even now we can remember she exists. And she will always, always be there, to offer us the light and take our hands, as gently as we need, and to tell us it’s going to be okay.

It’s going to be okay.

“To Dream of Flying” by Heather Keith Freeman
8″x10″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Image description: A silhouetted figure kneels against a blue-and-green background, ravens emerging from hir back and winging into the sky.

This is about the pain of transformation, even if it is into something wonderful. This figure is doubled over, clutching hir gut, even as zie sprouts the wings that are all zie has ever wanted, and in this moment there is nothing beyond the pain.

And what if zie wakes and it is all a dream?

The Morrigan by Heather Keith Freeman
10″x15″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The Morrigan has been tapping at the window of my subconscious for a while now, but it was only last week that she exploded forth in a specific form.

Image description: A woman dances, arms outstretched, veils swirling around her. Behind her looms the shadow of a stooping raven.

I had a photograph lurking in my reference folder of a bellydancer with veils that, in thumbnail form, I kept thinking was a stooping eagle. Then the Morrigan popped up in a Better Myth I was reading (warning: that link is hilarious but the content is not safe for work at ALL), the two clicked together and promptly took over my brain completely.

The Morrigan, a figure from Irish mythology whose name means “Great Queen” or “Phantom Queen”, is popularly known as a goddess of war and bloodshed; but in my research I discovered that she is more properly a goddess of sovereignty. The bloodshed is just what happens if you try violating that sovereignty! As I’ve been wrestling with some difficult issues of sovereignty and boundaries and personal power, it was quite appropriate that she should come out now. There’s also some interesting overlap with the things Havi Brooks and Hiro Boga say about sovereignty.

The downside – there’s always a downside when invoking a godform – was that I spent the week deeply, righteously, blood-afire angry, with no real way to vent or express that anger. Let’s just say I wrote a lot of unrepeatable things in my private journal. I did come out the other side, however, with a firmer grasp on my own boundaries.

Anger is a terrifying, destructive, cleansing, empowering force. Like any powerful tool it can be used and abused to great effect. The Morrigan is all about the proper use of that force, the channeling of destructive energy in service of greater things.

Prints are available.

The Coming of Spring by Heather Keith Freeman
11″x15″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The magic in the Goddess Circle continues to work apace. Recently many of us in the Northern Hemisphere have been bemoaning the length and misery of this bitter winter, and one sister commented that she’s been using “Spring is inevitable” as a mantra to get her through it.

That in turn reminded me of a quote I adore (which I even made into a bumper sticker here), from Afghan politician and activist Malalai Joya: “You can cut the flower, but you cannot stop the spring from coming.”

Anyway, that all connected for me to make this.

Image description: A woman stands, her hands upraised and eyes closed, amidst a grove of blooming cherry trees. Her hair and hands are festooned with blossoms, and her legs are fused into the ground with barklike markings, as if she herself is becoming a cherry tree.

And yesterday – yesterday, the temperature crept up, and I could smell the coming green on the breeze.

Edited to add: Prints have been made available by request. Original has been sold.

Some of us over at the Goddess Circle have been going through The Artist’s Way the last few weeks. It’s basically a 12-week course to unblock your creativity. You’d think a professional artist like me wouldn’t need that, right?

Wrong. While I am pretty creatively free in some ways, I am very very blocked in others. One of those blocked ways is writing. Another is sketching. Anything raw and loose or unrefined gets tangled up in performance anxiety and perfectionism. It’s not pretty.

Anyway, one of the core practices of The Artist’s Way is to write three pages every morning, of whatever comes into your head. You don’t read the pages, you don’t plan for them to mean anything, you’re just clearing out the cobwebs and the dreamsludge and making a clear space in your head for your ideas to bubble forth. I do them on 750words.com, to save my hand from RSI. I get up at 6:30, 30 minutes before my family wakes, and slip downstairs in the dark and quiet to wrap myself in a snuggie with my laptop and Red Bull.

This practice can be pretty painful at first. Barely awake, cold, stiff, cranky. Words splurt out in short, viscous chunks, a phrase here, a phrase there. Sometimes just one word, over and over. Gradually, unevenly, things ease. A full sentence emerges. An interesting idea bubbles forth – or maybe it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. Clearing space, creating sacred space in your mind.

After about ten days of this, it suddenly got easier. I realized I was looking forward to those few cold and quiet minutes before the dawn, that they anchored my entire day. And the words started to flow more easily, with a velvet frisson of pleasure not unlike the brilliant colors flowing from my paintbrush at other times of day.

The Writer by Heather Keith Freeman
9″x12″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

That’s how this piece was born. The first version of phrase issuing from her fingertips came to me that tenth day of morning pages: “the words stream sweet and soft and slippery like silk from my fingers.”

Image description: A woman sculpted out of black and white gestures gracefully on a background of swirling blue and green. Words flow from her fingers, through the air, and around the curls of her snakelike hair.

The phrases written into this piece are pretty hard to decipher even in the original, but they read:

• words that stream sweet and soft and slippery as silk from my fingers soul sundering wonder and shivering power, silvery flower of my self unfurled
• bold words that thunder through snow and shatter iron
• twisted words that tangle and strip and wither thoughts before they even begin
• tiny words still flow like water droplets from icicle tips in the raw chill of spring melt
• shadow words half-felt fading like dreams
• words that scramble into gibberish when I look to close clawing themselves to pieces like spiders if spisljlkjgahr glajhgakjelag
• ideas blowing over and through my brain like Medusa’s tentacles striving for air strangling for room to breathe and thrive and grow and be seen

This piece makes me happy, and I’m happy with it (two very different things). I’m going through a very rough patch personally, so I’m glad to have had this to carry me through it. It’s very difficult to drown in despair while I’m painting!

Prints and cards of this piece are available through RedBubble.

Back in the infancy of this blog, I did a post on the #1 question that creative types always get, namely “where do you get your ideas?” Now I’m visiting the topic again, this time in visual form, addressing what that moment looks like when an idea congeals into an image in my head.

Birth of an Idea by Heather Keith Freeman
11×15″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The idea may come from anywhere, but it’s channeled through my throat and third-eye chakras (having to do with communication and intuition, respectively), swirling out of me and coalescing into a vortex of… there – there it is. My breath catches – my eyes widen. I feel uplifted, hopeful, excited, energized.

It looks like this.

This is a true self-portrait, meant not only to represent my energetic self but actually to resemble my features, something I’ve tried many times but never succeeded in before. According to my husband, the resemblance is “spooky”, so I’m guessing I did okay! I wear glasses, normally, but other than that this is me. (Compare to the actual photograph on my ‘About’ page.)

Technical Notes:

I’ve talked before about how racist typical art education is; all the models, all the how-tos and anatomy lessons, are based almost exclusively on white models. Happily this seems to be improving in recent years, if only as judged by the diversity of the models in artist’s reference books; but when I was learning human anatomy, Ruby’s The Human Figure: A Photographic Reference for Artists was where it was at, and that was all white except for a headshot or two in the back section.

Anyway, I’ve been concentrating on representing people of color in my work over the last year, with a fair bit of success. I didn’t think this would come up when I ventured into self-portrait territory, because obviously I’m pretty damned white. However, I do have about 1/16 Native American blood, if family legend is to be believed, and I realized for the first time when doing this piece that I don’t have Caucasian eyes. Caucasian eyes are, simplistically speaking, ovals. Mine are trapezoidal teardrops, with a very flat bottom line, a subtle difference that turned out to make all the difference when it came to making a face actually look like me.

New art! Going up late on a Friday when nobody’s around to see it! (That’s what y’all get for not adding me to your RSS feeds…. ;)

Firedancer by Heather Keith Freeman
12″x9″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Image description: A woman, sketched in black and white outline on a yellow background, flourishes her arms. Swirls of fire stream from her fingers, swooping around her head.

I actually did this one before finishing Plaything yesterday, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to flesh out the dancer’s body at all or leave it in outline. I decided the contrast worked pretty well as is.

This was also what came out after a major creative frustration – another piece I was working on that I just. couldn’t. get. right. I tweeted about my frustration and was wisely advised to put it away before I damaged it or myself ;). But that left me with nowhere to put the energy I’d been building, which of course put me in a rotten mood, until I just drew something, *anything*, to get it out of my head, and what came out happened to be something I like a whole lot!

Between this and Plaything, I almost feel like I’ve got a touch of my pre-accident style back. I can’t do this regularly – it kills my back, even in small scale – but it makes me so happy that I can do any of it at all.

Color!

Long ago (okay, two years ago), my art was resplendent with color. I played with it, explored it, rejoiced in it. I was all about color, babe.

Then the accident happened. And I could no longer work on my grandiose, saturated canvases; the large gestures and long working times of using acrylic paint in that scale and that style now came with crushing pain. If I was lucky, I could do it for 10 minutes, and then I’d have to go lie down for an hour.

So I stopped painting. But because I couldn’t stop doing art, not and remain sane, I reverted to an older style of mine, using pen & ink, smaller canvases, and a highly stylized, graphic approach. I was able to do the vast majority of these works curled up on the couch with pens, and only bring out the brushes for a short run at the end which I could time for when my painkillers were working well. As I became more proficient with the medium, I was able to do more actual shading and wash that came closer to feeling like painting – the small canvas sizes mean I can do a coat of ink wash within the 5 or 10 minutes I have before my back starts feeling like it’s being eviscerated with knives – but it was still just black, grey, and white.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like working in black and white. The abstraction lets me get deeper into the ideas of line and movement, also crucial to my perception of art. But I missed color, so, so much.

The Rose and Dragon by Heather Keith Freeman
12″x9″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

A couple of weeks ago I picked up some colored inks, took a deep breath, and started this. Just looking at it makes me happy. The rich colors pop off the page, bleeding into my brain and giving me a happy buzz.

(Image description: On a field of stars floats a yellow dragon eating its own tail. Within, against a blue field, is a red rose with leaves stretching outwards in the shape of a cross.)

Subject-wise, it’s obviously a bit of a departure from my usual figurative stuff. I wanted something with fairly simple colors for my first experiment with it in this medium – and human flesh is not at all simple, color-wise (or any other wise, for that matter). Students of the occult will probably recognize these symbols; the short version for the rest of you is that it’s kind of a symbolic map of reality, showing the growth of life from the nothingness of space, to the stars, to the sun and the sea, out of which grow living things stretching back out to the stars. The Ouroboros (a dragon or serpent eating its own tail), the Rose, the Cross, are all magical symbols that could have (and have had) books written about them. Taken together, it’s a complex symbol that means a lot to me, but I’m not sure I can put it into words well. Hey, that’s why we have symbols in the first place – to communicate the incommunicable.

Fairy Burlesque Show #4 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Been a crazy week or so with kid/school drama, but all appears to have settled now and I’m back to focusing on art. Got a couple things to show you, which it looks like I’m going to break into a couple of posts thanks to the complexities of the subjects.

A couple of weeks ago I finished the Fairy Burlesque Show series! Here’s #4 to the right. I also, as promised, made a 4-up print for my RedBubble store.

Thanks to Everyday Kathy for her shout-out to this piece over at Everyday Bliss! Go check out her blog for more fairy artwork and little bits of everyday bliss.

The Fairy Burlesque Show was a fun little project. I’m done with these girls for now, but the format of the series worked out well, composing and telling the story behind it was fun, and I’ll keep the format in mind for future experiments, for sure. It’s a great affirmation that I do have the attention span to do series, which for a long time I was convinced I couldn’t do!

Last week, when I realized that Confluence was practically upon me, I of course came up with the idea to whip out a last-minute piece of art. The first one went really well, so… ok, sure, I can fit in a second one. That one went great too, so – keep in mind at this point that it’s Thursday evening, and I have to set up the show Friday evening – I did a third. And they’re all even in a series, which I practically never do. It’s also my first real success working in a small scale – these are 4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper.

As I worked, a narrative emerged. Have you ever noticed that all the fairies you see pictured in media are not only tiny, but skinny? Either stick-thin or the stick-with-boobs that is so disgustingly prevalent in fantasy art. Not that there’s anything wrong with being skinny, but I’m sure that fairies come in as many body types as us humans do, and I’m equally sure that the more full-figured ones are sick and tired of the skinny ones getting all the attention!

Hence – the Fairy Burlesque Show, posing for portraits. Here are the first three that I did last week. I’ll be doing at least one more, as I’d like to produce a 4-up print. They’ve been great fun to do, full of personality and surprise.

The Fairy Burlesque Show #1 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The Fairy Burlesque Show #2 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The Fairy Burlesque Show #3 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Edited to add: the fourth fairy is complete! Also, the promised 4-up print of the series is available on my RedBubble site.