This is my second week of running for an hour three days a week. This sounds like a really long time to run without stopping to me, but it doesn't usually seem that long while I'm doing it. I'm still slow, but I am surprisingly persistent.

That persistence has been useful to draw upon with my painting lately. I'm moving along, slowly, even though the Transcend series looks like a bunch of linoleum tiles right now and my other painting is just big and scary. Sometimes in the past I have kept on with projects, but other times I have just stopped. What seems different now is that I'm not listening to the chatter in my brain quite so much. Or rather, I hear it but I'm not paying much attention to it. Most paintings go through phases when they don't seem quite right; at least, mine do. There are plenty of stages left to adjust and refine and finesse.

One of the things I always want to know in the books I have about painting is what is the artist thinking when she or he chooses elements of the painting? I particularly wonder about this with collages. The technique is usually clear, but I suppose it's my nature to wonder about the psychology and the decision-making process. So I'm going to include why I'm choosing what I do in the Transcend series.



I put a light smattering of white on the clear background to fade the collage a bit. It was too visible compared to the way I envision it for the end result. There isn't any particular reason for this choice other than to lessen the clarity of the original collaged headlines.



Next, I sponged some indigo paint over the surface, more or less randomly. Indigo is a color that has seemingly contradictory meanings to me. It's one of my favorite colors; it's the color of night, my favorite time, and is somehow comforting to me. Which is odd considering that for me it also represents the color of dark nights of the soul, when everything seems meaningless and hopeless. It seemed an appropriate color for this stage of the background-building process. I followed with a smattering of blood red, which represents pain to me.

This all seems rather dark and depressing so far, although I'm not feeling affected by the negative aspects. As the working title indicates, this series is all about overcoming. So it is necessary to identify what must be overcome. A change agent will say that the first step in the change process is to clearly and honestly identify the problem, to tell the truth about what is so. This early part of the paintings corresponds to that part of the process.

I'm planning to carve a stamp for the next stage. I am hopeful the approach I've started to transferring the image is going to work; if it doesn't I'll have to try a different technique.

I learned the other day that a guy I dated for a pretty long time years ago had done some things recently that were really out of character for how I remembered him. I had not been in touch with him for years, so it wasn’t like I was following his life. But occasionally I would hear something about him, and this last information was just plain surprising.

All these years, I had considered him The One Who Got Away. Let me be clear—I broke up with him, and went on to marry my first husband which enabled me to move away from that town I grew up in, which probably saved my life. Nevertheless, I often thought of his character and his goals in life and thought with a little, but not too much, regret that maybe things could have been different if…

When I learned of this more recent behavior, I was suddenly released from that mild sense of regret that had been there, in the background of my life, for so long. The effect was as if I looked at a timeline of my life, and suddenly a thin thread of regret that had run along most of it was simply snagged away. It felt…strange. I had trouble even remembering what the regret felt like, or why I’d had it in the first place. The feeling was similar to that you might have when you walk through a room and you feel something is missing, but you don’t know what. And if it’s not something you need right away, you forget to care or even think about it again.

The point is the result is the same as if I knew all those years ago that I was making the right choice, instead of worrying that I was making a mistake. If I’d trusted I knew what I was doing, I would never have regretted choosing to move on. So now I’m wondering what it would be like if I broadened the scope of that little epiphany. What if I change a general belief that I’ve made mistakes into a belief that, at some level, I’ve always made the right choices? What if I trust this new belief by believing as well that perhaps the rightness of some of those choices may simply not be evident yet?

Wouldn’t this be like going into the past and doing something that changes the future? What other beliefs could I try this out on?