Journal Love Day!

On Sunday I had what my friend Leah over at Creative Every Day calls an ART PICNIC!! Here’s a little look into the Dirty Footprints Studio for you!!!

I have been hiding something from all of you.

For the last month or so I have been working on some paintings. Three to be exact. Acrylic paintings done on stretched canvas if you really want to know.

Usually when I paint I just bust these babies out. And, often before on Dirty Footprints I would document my process here along the way. Something is different about these paintings. First, my intention behind them is to come from a place of intuition while taking my time and paying close attention to detail. I feel that for these paintings to be a pure extension of my intuition, I need to keep them to myself for awhile. The second you place your work in a public arena, you are in a sense asking for feedback. What others say or don’t say will influence your relationship to the painting from that point on. Nothing wrong with that..actually it can be worlds of help sometimes. But these works are part of a spiritual journey. They are both my children–where I am nurturing them into existence, as well as my teacher–reflecting my inner self as a woman right now. In some ways, they are the heaviest paintings I’ve done in a long, long time.

Because of that…it is good, at least for me, to pick up the Art Journal again. Working in an Art Journal is also a very intuitive process, but one I definitely treat differently then working larger scale on canvas. Art Journaling is playtime as well as exploration on both a spiritual and artistic realm.

Maybe in an Art Journal I let myself get a little crazy…don’t take things so seriously. Maybe it’s not as meditative and sacred. Maybe it’s just pure fun and learning. So, I’m excited and happy to share these babies with you. As a promise to myself, I would like to make Mondays Journal Love Day at Dirty Footprints where I will post at least one journal entry from my week—more if there is more!!! My hope is that you too will find inspiration or ideas here and will be willing to share your own Journal Love on your blog. I encourage you to brag about it in the comment section even!!

Ok, enough rambling. Onto the Journal Love.

Above is my first entry in my spanking, brand new journal that I purchased right around the time I started running in April. I actually started this page around that time too and it has gone through quite a few stages of existence. I finally finished it yesterday during my little Art picnic!!!

Since I’ve started running I’ve become incredibly interested in how the body really works…running especially has heightened my awareness of my breath. I’m a bit extreme in the fact that my curiosity on breathing prompted me to learn more about the lungs…especially interested in seeing what they look like. This is where this journal entry has stemmed from. But, after it was finished, and after reflecting on it awhile…I do notice that I have two sides to the figure–one more glowing with warmth, while the other more cold. My own interpretation is that a part of myself is dieing in the process of a new life for myself that is being born.

This journal entry I began by simply spreading paint and pastels around…then I started writing freely. The images grew from there. The figures doing Yoga I cut out from one of my magazines. Altogether…I was thinking of vulnerability when creating this page and how sometimes our own mind–with its dark clouds, can make us feel naked and vulnerable.