The painting is really pretty! Thank you for sharing it, as well as writing such an interesting description. It would have taken me longer to notice the dripping/growing theme on my own.

What the painting made me think about most was how the black stems all around the outside are the same as the stems attached to the white flowers in the middle. Conceivably, at the tops of the stems are a lot more lovely flowers, so even though in this scene they give the image a dark feeling, they're attached to goodness and beauty higher up. It (ironically) reminds me of the poem about $1. Of course the blind men in the poem would also have to be mostly deaf and scatterbrained to not realize they were touching only part of the animal, but I like how it points out that we're all blind to some things, and only grasping at bits and pieces of what's actually there until we can try to make sense of the entire thing.

I haven't read your blog before but I am now I'm glad to read that you're feeling better ^_^

The painting is 40 inches tall by 16 inches wide, a long skinny painting. The colors are muted 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

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