Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday

Gotta love Salvation Army and the staff’s peculiar display choices. Every other store would break up all the retail items so each one looks unique, but at my local Salarmy they sort by colour, making finding your size sort of a crapshoot. But oh, that visual field! Those collections make my eyes feel like they’re turning into those cartoon black-and-white hypnotizing wheel things.

Same thing at the MAC counter or the Shoppers Drug Mart cosmetics aisle. I don’t have much use for all the lipsticks and nail polishes but I will go out of my way to pass those vibrating, too-exciting colour grids of reds, oranges, pinks, purples, golds. Rosy rows that that set the soul a-glow!

 I am inspired. I take photos, I go to the studio. I try to find that colour-field rapture.

It’s all too exciting, too exhilarating and just the thing for stopping my useless ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ thinking — or the screen-peering and pecking.

This latest painting might be better titled, Stop Sign, a visually loud/silent call to “Don’t just say something, stand there.”

But I will stick to Big Red, part of my ongoing Distracts series. Part meditation, part endurance test, part quilting, part painting, as fractured and distracting as our accelerated world.