KA-pow! and the universe.

'Jewels of Rubyvale' (Unfinished)

Part way though creating any of my paintings I get a ‘feeling’. Often it is just a feeling of rightness as in ‘This is what I’m supposed to do’ or ‘This is for my heart’ the latter usually responding to losing a little one or when I’ve successfully released an adult I’ve been particularly attached to. Very rarely do I get a ‘zing’, but when I get the feeling, it is like being almost winner on a treasure hunt. You have that thrill and excitement building in your chest, you’ve almost got the treasure, but just haven’t bagged it….yet. I’ve had that zing on my pieces such as ‘Nimitz and Missouri’, ‘Constantine’ and ‘Byron and Brumbie’.

Now, after almost three years of painting I’ve got my first ‘KA-POW!’ How do I try to describe it? Well, the feeling is mainly excitement with a dash of absolute fear attached to it and seriously, I’ve not felt anything like this before.

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I’ve been reading Pam Grout’s book E-cubed and one of the biggest and most useful things I have from it up until now (as I know I shall discover many more as time goes on) is that sometimes we focus on how we think we are going to get something to such a degree, we close ourselves off and blot out all other possibilities. Blocked off from such things as the universe (or field of infinite possibilities) telling us we actually need to try something different. I guess my ‘kapow’ moment stems from my allowing the ‘universe’ to talk to me.

For months now I’ve been working on a piece on a mother and baby Wallaroo, which I will be calling ‘Jewels of Rubyvale’ For weeks I’d been messing around with the background, then I decided I didn’t like the fact the mother was cut off and then the shadows weren’t right, this and that didn’t go together, blah..blah…. In the end I worried the thing to death and finally tried bringing Mum into the center of the piece, with baby in front of her body. I then started to get the ‘zing’ and thought Eureka! A week later though, I wasn’t happy with ‘this’ and ‘that’ was niggling me and so I decided to let my thoughts go away from it and relax.

My beautiful girl Tahdita as a juvenile and a painting based on how she would have looked if she was alive today. (RIP little girl)

How the universe speaks to us sometimes is mind blowing and I’m not sure if I linked things together properly or behaved like a bit of a dunce, BUT!  I was thinking about my red kangaroo Tahdita and how I lost her to a dog attack two years ago, this linked into my thinking about her absolute best friend Enapay the Wallaroo and how Enapay grieved for her friend for many weeks following her death and wouldn't bond with any of her other pen mates. Enapay herself was a miracle baby, in that nobody thought she would ever survive the traumatic experience of losing her mother and subsequent severe dehydration and starvation she suffered before being rescued. Yet she turned out to be the most beautiful, strong and resilient adult and was successfully released back into the wild.

Enapay looking at me, with her friend Tahdita standing guard.

I decided to paint Enapay and wow!
My KA-POW! moment, this is so right it makes my heart hurt. This painting has got to be the best painting I’ve ever done, EVER! Well, so far anyway. It isn’t finished yet, but Oh my…………. It makes my heart sing, it makes me more excited and filled with life and passion than I’ve felt for a long time…………….  


WHOOOOOOO   HOOOOOOOOOO

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KA-POW painting of ENAPAY (name meaning Brave from the Sioux language) as yet unfinished.