When I start to paint, what makes me happy or is troubling to me, I paint to resolve or shed clarity and light on: relationships with rare and incomparably sweet people, including family, friends, wonderful strangers, animal spirits, angelic guides. More and more these days, I am guided by the latter, these light beings, these good spirits.

In my process, I don’t necessarily hope for a canvas selling for sixty thousand or a million dollars—although that might be nice! Rather, I make an intention, set the space, light a candle and then leap. I try not to think, but to be, more like; to dissolve. I am not looking to create a masterpiece of a painting, but a masterpiece of my life. The more I surrender to the moment, dimming my sense of expectation, the more wholly rounded the moment can feel to me. The more real and yet ethereal I can feel in my body. Which is all I’ve ever wanted. I’ve always felt the light of our souls are our only true possession anyway and the only thing we take with us. I feel into my essence. What is it? Ah, here. What is yours? How are you creating your masterpiece of a life? What are you weaving in and leaving out? How are you tending to your glorious hours?

One afternoon, finagling with a painting I have worked on over three years now, I hear (quietly):

“This is not clothing. This is an angel announcing herself.”

Wild bursts of energy. Not holding back. It’s all a gift, especially the angel figure, and the completion of the painting. She is so natural, it all flows naturally.

The paintings are called “Double Benediction” and “Teenage Years”.

Here is how I am lucky enough to be living now, this is my experience of it, that my heart is at that gateway, doorway in the sky, peering in at the immensity, thinking of the line: “And I shall walk in my house with a perfect heart.”

Working now also on a linen canvas, which takes up most of a garage wall, and was specially built for me after I had a dream of, well, a holy painting. One it seemed I had done. I sketched it, noting the colors, in the dawn hours.

Here’s the thing about size, I think, as I work: when you’re in it, you’re in it.

6″ x 6″ or half a garage wall, it’s all the same.

Dissolve.

Merge everything into light. And love.

I am being shown paintings more and more in my dreams.

(an earlier draft of this post was originally posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2010)