When I’m on the (often packed) bus, I love to dream of how the ‘inner worlds’ of the passengers would surely —if we could only see them— kaleidoscope out of every body, swirl into the bus-space and billow rainbow-coloured clouds through the open windows into the city. Light rays of imagination, hopes, dreams and wishes (and vast human potential) would spin and fan and and speed like angels’ wings, leaving all they touched and brushed shining that little bit cleaner, clearer and brighter. For years I’ve thought to myself that one day I’ll try and paint this picture, but I haven’t done it yet.
However, from the last months of my 2017, in what is a more peaceful phase for me, when I have found the will to create just for the joy of it, has emerged this painting called Balance.
It came to life in my tiny kitchen on a found advertising board, cooked up out of evening energy, the challenges of dance practice, the fact that when I was born there was something odd about my feet, the curves and shadows of flesh and bone, almost fifty-five years of relationship dynamics and contrasts, integration of the masculine and feminine within us humans, my fingers, palette knives and brushes, and (among other colours) my favourite cobalt-blue acrylic paint.
I notice that I sometimes like to leave ‘blank’ areas (of white gesso) in my paintings. Even after weeks of observing the male figure, I don’t want to ‘colour him in’. Maybe this blankness represents the unresolved or unexplored in human lives. Or maybe it mirrors my need for stillness to balance the ‘noise’. Or it could simply be that I like the way it looks. Ha! What do you see in the flat whiteness? What does it reflect back to you?
The painting is taller than me, at 185cm (ish). A bit like my thoughts about the busloads of people, I love the idea that my ‘inner world’, part of which is manifested in this painting, is larger and more colourful than what shows on the outside. Balance is a flash of the normally unseen me, spilling out into the Universe as 2017 prepares to turn. Yay. I’m happy that it has.
May all our inner worlds manifest big and beautiful in 2018. SAL.
I played with the timer on my iPhone on Christmas Eve 2017 and managed to snap this, not perfect colourwise, but shows you the size in relation to me.
I’ll be super-happy if you share my work. Please use short quotes from the piece if you like and do share the images, but always always link back here.
For any other use, please ask me first.
Photographed with an iPhone the colours can be compromised and small amounts of cropping can occur. The real paintings speak more clearly.
Share art, share <3.
© Sally Townsend Blake 2017
