My painting hangs on my bedroom wall where I can see it while lying in bed. The image haunts me – in a good way. It keeps showing me faces and forms, often when I’m not wearing my glasses! When I put my glasses back on, it’s often hard for me to see what I’d seen moments before. Thus, the image feels fluid, alive, mysterious, and I learn once again how valuable soft focus can be.

The salmon I saw last week has been consistently swimming in a swirling pool through all these intervening days, so I know I want to begin with revealing the fish. Which I do.  A lovely, intimate experience in which I get totally involved with putting marks on paper, caring nothing for the larger image or what is leading what/where. It doesn’t matter. I am simply making marks and loving the process.

Comes a moment though when I have to step back, take a photo, assess what next and then I see, for certain, a bear face hidden over to the left behind hands. I bring the “bearish” face into being and then realize, there’s a huge black eye right near the bear. I have to do something with that and look who shows up. Whatever it is, I love it.

I go back to working on the salmon’s pool and realize there is an arm extending from the hand to the right and a hand/arm that need clarification on the left. As I am bringing those into being, my foot flips one of my big paint brushes into my palette, covering it with blue, green and black, all along the handle and the bristles. I take that as a sign – doodle on the paper to clean the brush and use up that precious paint. So I do.

I step back and survey the whole. MMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, I feel a humanoid calling and notice two blue dots up to the far right. They’re widely spaced and I think maybe an ET figure is meant to be there, but when I begin dealing with the head shape, it turns into a woman. And as I paint her, I have to cover up a black hand but I know the hand will be painted again on top of her mouth. She is the compassionate, silenced woman – a planetary call if ever there was one.

The photo below is my ending point for week 3. I love this experience of evolving, of fertilizing and growing. Feels REAL. And I love the not knowing where this image will take me next.