Globetrottering?

Yes, it seems to be a continuing fact. This year I first have been away from my flat during four months, from march to july (they were changing the watertubes in the whole house) and I lived in 12 different homes, visiting family and friends. Then I was home for a month and a half, cleaning dust and more dust. But oh so wonderful to be alone in my own place. I even painted two mandalas! Wow.

But lucky me that my computer, a Mac of cource, follows me wherever I go.
And my computer is full of photos from all my paintings.
And Photoshop!
How would I ever be able to be without Photoshop? No way.
I can select pieces from different paintings, cut and paste, liquify, modify, put on filters and in this way I can be creative and have a lot of fun which is good when I cannot paint.

Yes, it seems to be a continuing fact. This year I first have been away from my flat during four months, from march to july (they were changing the watertubes in the whole house) and I lived in 12 different homes, visiting family and friends. Then I was home for a month and a half, cleaning dust and more dust. But oh so wonderful to be alone in my own place. I even painted two mandalas! Wow.

But lucky me that my computer, a Mac of cource, follows me wherever I go.
And my computer is full of photos from all my paintings.
And Photoshop!
How would I ever be able to be without Photoshop? No way.
I can select pieces from different paintings, cut and paste, liquify, modify, put on filters and in this way I can be creative and have a lot of fun which is good when I cannot paint.

At this moment I am sitting at a table in Holland. Yes, and without a diccionary. But wait, that is not true. There are diccionarys on internet so I have no excuse if I spell a word wrong or if I don`t find a suitable translation. I am just lazy, but I feel very happy because the internet connection works with my own computer. Yippee!

Today I became even more happy when we went to the town nearby to buy colours and canvas, because in this little village I will spend a lot of my time and there is also a good space for painting.

The shop was huge and had everything! Even a different mark of waterbased oilcolours with lots of more colours. It couldn´t be better.

Now I just have to follow the flow and have confidence in life itselves.

Wonderings about the creation

These two small watercolour mandalas are about the creation, expressing one of  many metafors. 

"In the very beginning there was a Sound". 

So I have painted how I imagine that the soundwaves are spreading out through Cosmos, in circles or as sound-rays.

Good for meditation.

But I also wonder about other things, trying to be open.

 I have been painting for some hours to day on a very big painting, from the floor to the ceiling. I step up and down on a high stool to paint and then sit in the sofa to look. Paint and look, paint and look. 

Of cource I dance and breath. 

Breathing is very important to me. It opens me,  my body, mind and soul.

And the dancing. Just  dancing. 

Freely, following the needs of the body, expressing emotions of all kind. 

Slow, fast, soft, hard. Also with the face, entering in contact with my wild animals that has been hidden for so long time in my unconsciousness. 

So, a very short summing up what is important for me in life:

Breathing

Dancing

Loving

?

Ok!

Painting

"God" or if you prefer "Big Bang"

180 x 180 cm

This is my first textile mandala. When I did it I had no idea about mandalas, I just wanted to do it like this. 

It was funny. We, my family and I, had recently moved to the south of Sweden, to the countryside were  the mire with its little island was.

After some weeks the priest came to see us and wish us welcome. I suppose he was curious to know if we were presumptive visitors to his church. We showed him around in the house as the custom is in our country. When we came to the room where I was working  with this rather big textile, the devil flew into me and I challenged the priest telling him that I was sewing God. 

”Oh”, he said. Nothing more, and he left the room.

In my point of wiew I would have got very surprised and also very interested. And he, the priest who talks about God every sunday just answers ”Oh”! I would have asked a lot of questions such as: Why? How do you think? How come you do it in this way? For me it was an invitation to something deeper than  normal talk about coffee and cookies. However it was a good way to discover that this priest was a traditional one, without curiosity about other ways of looking on life and God.

However, no dissapointment.

It took me six months to make this textile of ”God” or ”the Big Bang”. In the center there is ”everything and nothing”. I like to see it as a metaforic diamond. In the Big Bang this diamond explodes and divides in small small pieces of diamonds. From the heat, fire and smoke every little piece gets very dirty and has to be cleaned on its way back to the original diamond.

So, every glaspearl could be seen as an image of the soul that longs for being complete again. There is a continuous movement in both direccions, one of many many paradoxes in life. Both and ...

When the soul is very far away from the center the attraction is not so strong but it gets stronger and stronger the closer it comes. And once there, it  is thrown out again ... perhaps in on other direccion... a continuos big bang...

Or, using God and the number 7,  the center  IS, that what is BEYOND everything. It divides in 7 ”Sub-Gods” wich could be seen as the different religions in our world. Every 7 divides in 7 again wich makes 49, which divides again in 7 which makes 343. There I had to stop. No more place nor pacience to sew more pearls. (there are about 23.000 of them)

Mandalas

watercolour, 90 x 90 cm

To paint mandalas is a wonderful thing to do. I started doing it 2003 when I lived one year in Barcelona.
It makes me calm and quiets my mind. The brainwaves slows down and the brain enters in a peaceful state and harmony.

I know it works like this. At least for me.

It was not always easy to live in a little flat with lots of noises and smells,  alone and not every day in peace with myself. So instead of walking up and down the room, (which was util in wintertime when the flat was rather chilly) or going to the movie, I dedicated many, many hours to the mandalas when I was inquiet or depressed.

First I coloured pre-drawed mandalas from books (it was easy to find these books in special bookshops) and then I started to do my own ones, which of cource was even more funny.

It is said that CG Jung painted a mandala every day during ten years in order to help him to handle  the separation from S Freud. It helped him to follow his inner psychic development.

The mandala above is inspirated by a traditional tibetan old mandala.
It is so fantastic with mandala-painting because you can give yourself totally freedom to paint whatever you want. You just make a circle and start improvising.
It is good to know that what is inside the circle represents your inner life and what is outside is consequently your outer life.

During my stay in Barcelona I wrote a little tale and paited twelve mandalas with the dragon Isidor and my grandchild Gabriel as protagonists.
As I tomorrow will go to Spain and spend ten days with two other grandchildren and I will be without internet, I plan to translate this tale for my coming blogs. That will be interesting.

Once upon a time there was a princess ...

... who had a great longing for her prince that should come on a white horse and love her always and forever. 

She waited and waited, sitting close to her life-tree.

 Her yearning grew but he never came. 

But one day when her princesscrown had fallen off her head, as the leaves fall off the trees in the autumn, 

and she almost had given up her hope for love,

a little frog came jumping in the grass.

The little frog, who wasn´t that little, stayed in front of the girl who seemed to have fallen asleep, (or was she crying?)and waited for her to wake up, (or stop crying) so that she could give him the kiss of love that would set him free.

After aeons of endless time the girl finally stood up and kissed the frog with great tenderness.

Oh, you have no white horse! You are a dragon! And me too!  Wow,  what a surprise!

Let us start a wild love-dance.

oil, 76 x 110 cm

May I present: Dragon Isidor

 When I first met Isidor he was a pulp. Like this:

and this was his feminin appareance:

Today I will need many words in order to present Isidor a little bit closer.

I met this pulp at an "island" in the middle of a mire.

On this little island there was a nice hole where I used to sit and contemplate over life and enjoing the sun,  being hidden from the eyes of moose and their hunters if the happened to pass by. 

(it only happened in the autumn)

In the hole there was a treasure and the task of the pulp was to protect this treasure, so, he was not very happy to have two human intruders there, not to forget the dog. It was interesting because the dog didn´t like to go to mire at all. There where snakes, wasps and then this bad humored pulp! 

Obviously she  had eyes to see what we humans only could feel or divine.

Well, I have to make it short. 

The years passed and one day suddenly there was an opening in the clouds  and Isidor showed himself for the first time and I gave him his name from a child-book about cute, sweet and kind dragons. 

Slowly the pulp began to transform into Isidor and since then he has been a very good friend.

I just want to add that the treasure that was hidden in the hole was of cource of spiritual nature.

When I painted Isidor for the first time it was funny to put him in a more dragonlike, wild nature. 

But no fire yet. He was still a very young dragon!

Impossible to plan in advance

watercolor, 50 x 70 cm

Well, I do plan before which image I shall upload and write about. And yesterday I choose three paintings about the reunion of the two polarities.

It was not that easy. There was only one! (if I don´t count a carpet). 

Perhaps I painted this one some ten years ago, I don´t remember and it is too much fuss to take it out and see if I have put the year on it. What I do remember is that I got surprised and a little scared when I saw what I had painted.

So much pain! Still! (By that time I had not yet discovered Tantra.)

My intention had been to show how "heaven" and "earth" at last had melted together.

What a disappointment! 

Using the story of Adam and Eve as a metafor, I had a theory that inside every human being there is a great pain and sorrow as a result of having been throwned out from the Garden of Eden. One could say that this symbolical event was the starting point for the  cleavage between man and woman, between masculine and feminine, the differences between the left and right brainhalves, between ying and yang ... 

I know, I know! My reasoning can meet many objections .... it doesn´t matter. For me it has served for doing my paintings and I have my creative liberty to explain whatever I want with the words I want to. 

And using Adam and Eve as symbols for the old-time man and woman has served me a lot during many years of inner journey.

And of cource I have many textiles and paintings with Adam and Eve. They will come later.

And of cource I continue my traveling ...

One more separation ... the third and last one.

oil, 70 x 105 cm

Some years ago I studied rethoric at the university. The first year was very funny because we made a lot of speeches. (The second year was too academic and I left it in big frustration) But as my memory is not among the most brilliant ones I have forgotten almost everything I learned.

But one thing was important: the number three. 

A speech should contain three subjects and these could be reflected  from three different sides. You could have three examples, three sugestions and so on.

This trick I now will use in my blog. So I will show three "separations" and then change subject.

That´s why I have onother separation-painting, this time in oil.

Just for fun I have counted how many separations-images I have made during my 28 years of creating art.  There were not so many! Just 4 textiles, 6 watercolors and 3 oils.

 Only that? Well, then I´m not too squared! (thanks dictionary) 

Textile separation

225 x 112 cm, wool and glasspearls on white velvet

Here I have played with the "divine sword", or the life-force, that cuts the tree in two parts, which for me signifies the startingpoint in becoming human being. One can see the female and masculine tree, how they are separated with great pain and then how they come together in the bigger tree after many, many lifes.

The concept of reincarnation is for me a fact, not something that I believe in or something I wish was true. I know because I have done a lot of work "going down" (difficult with words) to many other lives.

I suspect I will come back to this subject many times.

As I´m rather lousy at drawing the human body, especially faces, I very early choose to make trees instead of bodies. Much more easy and funny. So I have done hundreds of trees and probably my "tree-period" will never end.

Well, sort of it ended eight years ago when I started to paint in a more  intuitive way. Besides, I also got allergic to my wools (and our dog) so I had to quit totally making textiles.

I paint with watercolour and waterbased oilcolours. That is good for the smell at home and of cource it´s important not to pollute the environment.

Many years ago.

When I started to do textiles and paintings 28 years ago, more or less, I was very inspired by a channeled espiritual teacher. I got the idea to change his simple drawings into something more beautiful but with the same message in it. Well, sort of.
But very soon I started to do my own images, wanting to express all this new insights about life, about why´s and how´s and when´s. About the inner growth and so on and so on.

We talked a lot about the masculine and feminin inside each person. About man and woman. About the separation and differences between the sexes.
This huge subject has occupied my mind since then and I have done many paintings and textiles with this theme.

The watercolour painting above (50 x 70 cm) is one of them.

For me, one of the tasks we human beings have here on earth, "coming down" life after life, is to melt this two forces in us together and become whole, complete and one.

I know it sounds a little woolly or wishy-washy (lucky that I have a diccionary) but for me it is very clear!
Well, I have been dealing with it for many years and I still have more to learn.

Much more difficult than I thought.

We live in a sort of "free" world and I suppose that one can write a blog in a language that is not your native language. This is only a test for my self.
Tomorrow I will continue. What a challenge!!!