“Show me the songs of a land and I will show you her laws.” - Socrates
How? How can a painting speak of a future yet to come?
It all starts with the artist. If the artist is in her left brain and painting from her intellect, it would be unlikely that the painting is moving beyond human strength and seeing into the future. However, if the artist is painting with her right brain something Divine begins to happen.
It is through our right brain that we can perceive spiritual things or things that are supernatural or outside of ourselves. Our right brain taps into energies and electromagnetic fields from other people or animals. Our right brain is responsible for empathy and higher consciousness.
Just imagine it: your left brain taking a break while you’re painting; that judgey, skeptical, persnickety left brain is tuned out and not bothering you.
Your right brain is finally free to begin absorbing and perceiving all that is around you — it feels the unseen and dials into its own language of abstraction, color, shapes, impulses, and emotions from within you, all around you, and from the realm beyond. It is in your right brain that you become a conduit of sorts — where the divine flows through you while you filter it through your taste, experiences, preferences, and intuition. It's a beautiful dance! A wondrous life of a creative.
Embedded in the nuance of brushstroke, color frequency, and tone is the uncorrupted influence of a Divinity beyond us. Some call it the muse, universe, or energy.
Some call it God, Spirit, or Jesus. It is this that touches nature, wind, light, experience — it is the creation that speaks while we paint. This lives outside of time and presides over the future and calls us to it.
This is how we paint something and then years later begin to live it out.
I painted poppy fields and Mediterranean homes with red-tiled roofs for years and years but never ever saw a poppy flower in real life. Many years later I moved to Greece in the spring and woke one morning to the field in front of my house full of bright red poppies.
I painted horses for years and years when they only meant something symbolic to me. Then after six years of painting them, I was given a horse named Beau and am now a forever equestrian.
I painted fireflies in forests for two years and never saw one in real life. Then I moved from Phoenix to a forest in Georgia where fireflies are everywhere all summer long.
This is not something I just made up.
This is why you deal with resistance, or lack of support, or a testing of your commitment. Every artist before you had to overcome these things too.
We artists carry the future in our brush. This is our heritage. This is our calling. We work as a team with all of the painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets. We paint our song and it will determine our future’s laws.