Hello all,

So in the last post … er yesterday….I outlined some things I wanted to do immediately and in the long term, as a sort of last sight bucket list. So one of those things was paint something…and here it is.

If you want a description of the painting, go to r/ blind. A description will be added to the comments some time later. I am going to bed.

I said somewhere that you should paint with total abandon. I did. It was really nice. I really enjoyed the act of painting this one. It was reckless.

I am only slightly regretting this recklessness now as I ended up COVERED in paint. I had paint up and down my arms and legs, on my face, between my toes, under my fingernails. My husband laughed when he came to wish me good night and found me crouched over the painting with two hand fulls of paint. He didn’t even consider giving me a good night hug or kiss. He just chuckled and told me he loved me and wandered away to bed.

I don’t go all anti-brush that often. But it was a night to paint with total abandon. A night to paint for just me. It was worth it. Even though I am now cleaning a paint ring off my tub and washing paint smears off my shower curtain, still worth it.

As to the freakout, I am feeling a little better after having written yesterday’s post and also followong through with this painting. Sometimes you have to just keep swimming.

I do want to add one thing to my last sight vision bucket list… coffee with Norman Reedus.

Be well,

-Claudette

Description for r/blind:

The painting is 40 inches tall by 16 inches wide, a long skinny painting. The colors are mutes and gray, all running and bleeding into each other. Black-green splatters, meant to emulate wild grass, frame three white flowers. The flowers are white poppies and they too are splashing onto the canvas and melting downwards. the overall direction is vertical, the paint melting downwards as the wild grass and wild flowers push upwards toward a dim light. The bottom of the painting, where the black grass should be a thick inky tangle, the painting instead dissolves away into tiny rivulets.

If you touched it now you would be covered in wet paint, but if you were to touch it in a few weeks, when it is all safely dry the splatters of black-green grass and the edges of the flower petals would feel smooth, you would be able to feel the vertical direction of the background, and at the bottom of the painting where it dissolves away, you would be able to feel the rivulets where the solvent cut a path through the paint and carried some of it away. The bottom of the painting is also gritty, covered in a fine spray of salt to give a particular texture and force the melting paint to split into a myriad of rivulets in its downward journey, like water around stones.

The painting is dark in color, being only dimly lighter in the center. The flower petals are the brightest thing in the painting , seeming almost to glow. To me it seems like three of the last flowers to bloom at the eve of a nuclear holocaust.

Sometimes paintings feel insanely personal. They are this wordless expression.. Sometimes I don’t even know what I am trying to say with them. Describing this painting is .. embarrassing and difficult. I painted it for me, just to paint and I honestly don’t know what to make of it. It is pretty, but sad. I like it, but I don’t know how much I like describing it. It feels too much like an exposure when described.

I sometimes think paintings are messages from some voiceless part of my “self.” Not always, not when I am painting with a set end in mind, but when I am letting the painting happen. Here is a link to a youtube clip about your brain.

It feels like paintings that happen are messages from my right hemisphere.

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