A PICTURE FOR LETITIA

LETITIA

This is the painting which was sent to Canada as part of the International Women Celebrate exhibition where women around the world participated in raising funds for the Haiti disaster. I called it Letitia.

This painting was a very emotive exercise for me, starting it while with a dying friend, during her last week of therapy.

Even looking at it now, I feel the tears well up in my eyes, remembering our long and deep conversations, how she lay on the couch with tubes coming out her nose, quietly watching me work and giggling softly at my frustrations. After only a year, we formed a strong and strange bond where her circumstances called for complete trust in me and my absolute devotion to her.

Occasionally I still feel her presence, especially now that I am busy on a family portrait.

There are things added to the painting however which make me smile. Wanting to include everything which my senses were experiencing at the time, I painted it in. Eg, looking carefully, you will see that the toe of the naked,curled up figure in the centre, its abnormally large. A dear friend cracked her toe against something and said that it was big and swollen....well, I happened to be painting the feet at the time, so I added the mental image!

The figure of Jesus was part of a dream. I had three small incomplete pictures of the face of Jesus which I'd started a while back. Now one of them had shot through the canvas!!

I felt compelled to paint it although it had obviously not been part of the initial genre (of women being compared to flowers, tender, bendable, beautiful, vulnerable).

The result; ( for me anyway)...., was a very disjointed picture,..... but a picture that evoked applause and tears in Canada. The owner of the gallery hung it in her bedroom till the opening and apparently it was one of the first to be sold. What better compliment is there than that?! Mission accomplished, for me and for a very special friend. She knew it was being dedicated to her so I know she's smiling.

The lesson in that was that Jesus is always behind us in whatever we do, BUT HE WANTS TO BE PART OF THE PICTURE...TRUST HIM.

Dealing with Hurts

The Lie of Love
And so this strange journey continues, a stony road of rebuff
Lined with distorting mirrors which turn smiles into scowls
I hold aloof my heart lest it, once again, be scorned and rejected
As wicked Misinterpretation has again seen another countenance

I know guilt and cruelty created the box where rationality is hidden
Here where the fuddled groping of hurt can be shut out
The key is hidden in a tight fist of pains' deafness and denial
Blessed release rebuffed for the thin blanket of comforting darkness.

Empty, injured eyes look daily, unseeing, into the face of unconditional love
Unconciously reaching out but conciously fearing the nakedness of trust
Love is naught but the bringer of despair and terror-ridden memory
A haunting, disturbed lie which substitutes faith with creedless scorn.

So on and on, drowsily treading this path with a hand holding my own
The Great Consoler leads with benevolence and cooing whispers
Shattering the images of the deciever , the shards reflecting the soul
My own and that of a kindred spririts, all, on a restorative search.

I've left this in my blog as a draught for a while as it was a very personal, emotive piece which I wrote while trying to cope with a hurt. When reading it, I discovered that it wasnt so much about the content but rather the process of confronting, understanding and taking the time to search for answers, process them and then walk away from the cause and not (never)the source.

Love is the essence of all human life, it feeds , its needed for life almost as much as its needed to be given away. We were all created in it and through it....I'm not speaking of primal human love, or the love of parents (which is sometimes sadly absent in creating another life) but the love of God.

I am often almost drowned by the intensity of my own feelings, a whole range of them, and need to separate myself from myself sometimes, in order to deal with them... go outside to see in, if that makes sence.