Painting with Focused Emptiness

The website is out there, waiting for you!  At: tinavandewater.com.
I heartily thank my daughter, Margo, and my husband for their work on my behalf!

A Word About the Site:

The intent of the website is to provide a way for me to share my painting life, both visually and through an attempt to capture in words the issues in my painting process. This process attempts to extract images that resonate with my life - images that are abstracted and opaque - images that generate a smile for me with that sense of coming home. 

As I say in the website, I have come to feel like it’s my job to share whatever I’ve got in me with the world - a chance to ride the light before it fades. See what you think.  And please share the site with others who might find that my work also reflects their lives, as they explore the painting. 

Newsletter#3: Painting With Focused Emptiness

So what exactly am I thinking when I paint? Hopefully not much 😬. I often can’t listen to music or a podcast because both affect my mindset - kind of a focused emptiness, which is so hard to attain and hold onto:
Random marks with ink, graphite, charcoal or paint.
Smudges.
Different marks on top.
More smudges.
Layer after layer until something rings familiar, enough for me to follow its lead. Gradually, there’s a sense of resonance between what I see that my hand did and something inside me. Something interesting enough to pursue. And I’m off. Or I wipe it all off and start over again.

I’ve selected three images, here, that show some of the original exploratory marks that never got buried by later layers of paint:

First image #40-2021 allows the original line work to prevail, done in oil paint and graphite. To me, it’s almost like an entangled and spirited conversation.

Second image is from 4/2019 with acrylic ink blown through a straw and finished in oil paint.  Yet another entanglement, though this one seems more botanical.

Third image #70-2022 is a piece I’m currently working on.  This one shows much of the original line work in oil paint, using a narrow printers’ brayer.  That early structure was largely maintained.  Though who knows, it may morph yet again.  Right now, it has a feathered, energetic containment quality, like a protected place for launching.

So, I’m using the part of the brain that can’t think in the usual sense, hooked up to a hand that also doesn’t think, and I’m left to depend on whole body associations produced by random marks.  And somehow the sky’s the limit!  

In a sense, mistakes don’t exist in this arena (and this idea could happily rub off on other aspects of my life 🤔).
It also really helps not to value the end result nearly as much as this incredible process that can bring huge surprises now and then, if I can only stay out of its way.  
Over time, a confidence developed - a confidence that I can deal with whatever comes my way (another life lesson?).  

The trick seems to be staying in touch with what I resonate with, in all the nooks and crannies of my days.  As if some resonance inside me synchronizes with a resonance of an outer experience, and I notice and keep the moment.  And when I notice one of those synchronies in my marks, it calls me to follow.

Thanks so much for joining me!