Update 2024 -06-12
<< Back to Tree of Life Blog Home
Aloha Vince,
I hope things are going well in Bulgaria and you are having a great time with your family. This is an update for you on what I’ve been working on.
When I work on paintings, they are integral to my healing path. Sometimes when the paintings resolve themselves they paint me, heal me.
This has been a lot of work to figure out how to present the painting. I’ve looked at it from many different angles and added a new angle yesterday. I took some mushrooms yesterday and did a deep dive into the process. What came up for me is that I have been so wrapped up in figuring it out that I left my feelings, my heart out. And that’s important.
As I was working on the tree (endless iterations) one drawing the Tree became feminine, curvy with her hip thrust out to the side. I wrapped the aya vine around the trunk in a sensual way which became the arm of her lover. A dark bump on the opposite side became the head of her lover. How can I leave love, connection out of anything related to your family? I can’t. It wouldn’t be authentic to you or the painting.
That has been the missing element in a lot of my art work for too long. (see image below) Sketches with border around them are to the aspect ratio of 64 to 89 1.39 to show location of the tree in composition.
1. So, in regards to my comment last week, questioning the horizontal to vertical composition, I’ve been working to place the size and location of the Tree. To fit everything in (or most everything) from your list, the tree becomes a vertical ‘skinny’ tree, not wide like the ones you’ve sent me. This is a puzzle to me depending on what the importance, the focus to be.
2. It then becomes necessary to scale the tree down so that I can show the composition across the top with the sky and the ocean and the volcano in the background. As your family seems to travel a lot, maybe add some polynesian boats sailing in the distance with a pod of whales. This takes the painting from ancient history through to the future.
There is a small jungle waterfall to the bottom left. There are ayahuasca blossoms in the bottom right corner.
3. I’d like to recommend a few things:
- To do the sky as a galactic/nebula background and not a regular sky. This would give the ‘rainbow’ an amorphous shape like the Orion Nebula The Veil Nebula or this galaxy spreading across the sky area. The sun then becomes a star and could also have a rainbow halo around it
- Then the 17 characters have descendants disappearing into the distance (all in the sketch represented as circles) showing a long life of your lineage past the present.
- I would like to do the 17 characters not as a full body shot but have close up shots cropping in, concentrating on an element of what their trade, their business is. There can be so much added to a separate art book giving a detailed history/story of these characters are, even in a fairy story.
