Doesn’t the world feel very extreme and polarized? In my series Earth Changes/Pole Shift, I’ve painted with the intention to bring a visual/emotional harmony in the negative emotions despite the conflict. And now I’m offering to put you in a garden or enchanted forest. All is not lost and we are not only wandering in a wasteland of sorrow, there is also beauty, unending. Souls can’t be degraded, let’s focus on our souls instead of all the fighting and misery. If enough of us remain centered (loving, forgiving) maybe what is ugly out there will begin to transform through our good gestures and essence of positivity. The price range for these commissions are the same as for Spirit Paintings–see Spirit Paintings here on my site for more info or contact me directly through the site. (These are healing-painting- meditation artworks.)
With Thunder in the Dwelling/8th grade Acrylic on canvas 36″x36″
Transitional times often are full of resistance due to negative emotions such as guilt. Guilt can be the first step in acknowledging responsibility for mistakes once made, yet guilt is also the ego’s successful way of entrapping us (ego does not like to let go of pain because it is one of the ways that it knows itself–the ego wants identifiers and pain and guilt do feed the ego-self which needs blame in order to hold others and self hostage–it is a control thing).
Often people will “guilt you” for not doing as they’d like you to do, or by reminding others where they/we fell short. And we often do that to those around us. Since none of us are perfect, the most kind people of all may be rendered excessively hurt by someone laying guilt upon them, and the one receiving the accusations may then disallow harmony as a way of self punishing. Forgiveness purifies all of this: we forgive ourselves, we forgive the accusers and we forgive our ego for trying to hold on to negative emotion. What if everyone said,”I’m sorry, I love you. You and I made and make mistakes, but we are only human”–wouldn’t that be great? Sometimes there is no way to resolve an issue except from within, which is to embrace forgiveness on our own terms, whether the people around us are able to do so or not. And they may have not even asked us for forgiveness. Do it anyway to set yourself free. And set yourself free again by not allowing others to guilt you into paralysis or self misery.
Don’t hold on to guilt, but grab forgiveness and see if you feel so wonderful you alight your path in the blink of an eye with tremendous love and joy.
This is a recent Spirit Painting I was commissioned to create. These are very different from my other work (abstract and other figurative work) because I meditate while creating it for the person who commissioned it (or for their loved one). I paint what comes. It is a very surprising process for me as the painter but for the recipient, too. These are done for a mitzvah (read that as a “good deed”) and I charge next to nothing for them, but I feel strongly that I should make them available for anyone who might want one, which means the commission fee is very low. Check out others here on my site, under the Spirit Painting heading at the banner. And of course contact me via this site if you’d like one!
This new painting in the series is currently at Art/Place Gallery in Fairfield, CT. In the meditative state I entered painting it, I felt that swell of momentum reminding me of great ocean waves. Even stepping just a few feet into the breaking waves, there is a power so tremendous, so epic. And when we are subjected to the tide, we succumb to it. We may play with it, but it is with the understanding that the force within each crashing arc of salt water, there is incomprehensible power. We in your physical form are but a moment of time upon a shore that raged thousands of years before we were present, and this same rising and falling, according to its attraction to the moon and the sun, will breathe in and breathe out long after we are all gone in our current form. White horses run toward us, crashing at our feet, as we stand in “the tide of time and light” as it says in the Siddur. Our time is upon us with each wave, our choices and destiny.
A recent painting from the Earth Changes Series (recently on exhibition at Art/Place Gallery)
The seer and healer, Edgar Cayce, spoke of extreme changes in our climate that would include storms, fires, floods, earth quakes and volcanic eruptions. In his trance state, he saw such drastic weather patterns and events that until somewhat recently seemed predictions of the future. Our poles would shift, he warned, and they are, which brings with it a lot of chaos. I see it in the way people are interacting (we are very polarized politically, for example) as well as in nature. I hope that within this chaos we manage to find harmony. These paintings seek to allow harmony, to well wish us to ride out the storm of extremes with a sense of peace.
From the Earth Changes painting series, Pole Shift/Amplitude acrylic on canvas 36″x36″
This painting recently sold at Art/Place Gallery in Fairfield, CT. The series of work is based on our changing and turbulent times, as foretold by Native Americans (long before “white man” came to shore) and more recently, Edgar Cayce, known as “The Sleeping Prophet” in the early to mid-20th century. My intention with creating these paintings is to envision our polarized society closer to harmony, even while extreme weather and events in nature suggest the magnetic pole shift is heavily underway. Can humans harmonize, demonstrate compassion and conscious action, even when nature is extreme and dangerous? Do we effect nature just as much as it may impact us? To learn more about pole shift, which Cayce predicted long before the idea of it was taken seriously, go to NASA.
Join us at Westport Arts Center on Wednesday evening, November 15 at 6:00 for a reception celebrating the latest Westport Arts Collective Pop-up Show featuring many of the member’s work (including a few from my new series, Earth Changes).
A new painting, Girl and Uncles, is now at Art/Place Gallery in Fairfield, CT through April 9th 2017
I don’t often directly paint dreams, though I am continually inspired by my dreams. This particular dream was so soothing and wonderful, I wanted to capture its essence at least. In the dream, there was a girl sitting on a velvet chair in a living room with soft off white, feathery carpet. The floor was hilly! And it made perfect sense somehow. Soft, feathery shadows of trees and things danced across the hilly floors. The girl had two uncles, and both were busy making the home lovely for her. It was a magical dream.
When we come together, something happens. Have you felt that synergy–the feeling of joining with others and a momentum begins? This happens especially when we connect with the intention to create out of a sense of love and goodness for the world.
A recent Spirit Painting commissioned by a client 2016 copyright Elaine Clayton
Yesterday I painted a childhood scene, above. I was born and lived on the flat plains of the Texas Panhandle until I was about 10 years old. The land may be flat out there (oh yes, it defines “flat”), but the sky is multi-dimensional and ever changing. Clouds build in fathoms moving upward, their color and shape spectacularly mounting and powerful. Shadows from the clouds move like vast omens across the land at times. And when rain came, I remember running from it with other children in summer time, until at last, the cloud full of rain caught up with us, and giant round drops of warm water made dark circles on dry dirt, or on paved roads. The sky gave what the land did not–a particular elevated and hopeful, colorful, mysterious bounty. Where the land was austere, silent and seemingly ungiving for the most part, the sky was overly generous, entertaining and voluptuous. The wind was it’s agent, whirling up dust devils and making the songs of ghosts, the way it could howl an eerie song on some days. It brought jagged looking and well-beat tumbleweeds passing by. They seemed like roaming story tellers who happened along, and somewhat like victims of circumstance. The sky knew where they had been before. I grew up expecting the sky to tell me something. I learned to look at the clouds for information and guidance. The intuitive kind of knowing that comes from feeling inspired by the brilliance in nature is what I”m talking about here, the way sky communicates that which we ought to have recognized anyway, but need prompts and reminders. Gentle and sometimes dramatic. I believe the sky is “the veil” between us and heaven, and it symbolizes our ability to know intuitively and to quietly observe things which we need unveiled. It is like doing a tea reading, but instead of looking down into a tea cup, you just look up instead.
