Reality is love creating story. This is true of quantum particles playing out their dance and true of the universal macrocosm playing out its dance of stars, black holes, and galaxies spinning through space. It is true of our own multi-dimensional selves. We are all aspects of love creating story. In group is found the wholeness of that story.

The wholeness of our story requires perspective to see and understand it. This is like painting, each painting looks like a discrete separate form. Yet the arc of all the paintings I have ever created are one continuous process. So a failed painting is not a failure. It is a moment of recognition of how the process works and that knowledge is revealed in the subsequent paintings.

So it is with the story of humanity. It may look a mess, just as paintings look terrible at certain stages of development, and it may not achieve its immediate aims, just like an individual painting may appear to fail.

It is always a matter of perspective. If one painting is all there is, the failure of it is a calamity. But if the perspective is of a continuum of the process of painting, a failed painting is simply part of the larger process. So it goes with humanity. But we have difficulty finding the perspective to see that when we are deeply enmeshed in this immediate experience on the planet.

The post Reality Is Love Creating Story appeared first on Energies of Creation.

Looking back at my own life it could largely be dramatized as a series of tragedies if one were so inclined. Personally, I prefer to look at the thread of creative expansion that runs so consistently through it all.

In the late eighties I made a major move from my beloved Arizona desert to Whidbey Island in Washington. I had been missing green trees too much to remain in the increasing smog of the Valley of the Sun.

I considered waiting until my daughter graduated from high school but I decided it was my last chance to give her the experience of living in a small settled community. She had only known the highly transient sunbelt where we hardly knew our neighbors because they came and went so rapidly.

She did not welcome this decision. We had something like world war three her entire junior year in high school! She is now raising her own children on Whidbey so I am happy to say that light dawned at last.

In the midst of that turmoil I also nearly lost my jewelry business. Without my knowledge my business partner took out a loan on all the equipment, including mine and then defaulted on the payments.

When the bank wanted to take the equipment and discovered they had no right to mine, a huge mess resulted. Eventually I took over the bank note and all the equipment, with my business partner bowing out of the situation.

No matter how much creative drive you possess, sometimes you just have to give it a rest. I took a year off jewelry design to recover from the massive stress.

When I resumed, I was newly invigorated and began some more major changes in my life. My daughter was out of high school and I headed off to Colorado to design for one of my longtime wholesale clients.

Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park occupied most of the time I was not at the jewelry bench. It was a glorious time in my life.

When I returned to Whidbey I almost immediately moved to Lopez Island to marry Bern, a wonderful artist who has brought incredible joy to my life for 18 years now.

He got excited about designing jewelry and we spent several years doing high end juried art and craft shows all over the United States, sometimes as many as 22 shows a year. We created some really unusual jewelry and met some wonderful people who became our clients.

Driving around 33,000 miles a year does create a lot of wear and tear though. We eventually opened an art gallery here in Ennis, Montana and quit running all over the country.

The gallery opened more doors since we no longer were restricted to the specific look of the jewelry line that had been juried into a show. In fact, we were not even limited to jewelry.

When we opened the gallery I could garden in ways that travel had made impossible. That garden led me back to paint one morning at dawn when I saw all my poppies glowing in the light.

While it seems perfectly natural now to be painting flowers in great explosions of paint, another surprise greeted me when I found a missing folder of my poetry this week. It had been misfiled some years ago, so I had not seen the work in a long time.

I was astonished to see how flowers and their imagery had woven through my poetry for many years before I ever picked up a brush to paint them. That creative theme had been present all along without my noticing.

I don’t know what changes are coming next, but I feel them strongly even if I cannot yet define their physical forms. I do see myself leaving jewelry behind sometime soon.

Publishing is a new challenge I have been enjoying and I see that growing. I have resumed sculpture in a small way recently but that may remain a minor note.

So it is time to be quiet and let the creative muse offer her gifts and open new doors. It is much like driving a winding mountain road wondering what splendid vistas the next curve will reveal.

For related articles see Adventures with the Creative Muse Part One and Adventures with the Creative Muse Part Two.

This post appears in Carnival of Healing #124 where you can find a fine assortment of healing articles.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

The post Adventures with the Creative Muse Part Three appeared first on Energies of Creation.

They were a turbulent and difficult passage of time in which I married a Canadian and started a family in Ontario. I set aside my artwork and did the full time mother routine. I loved my children but always carried a deep sadness that I would not create work of the caliber I saw when I went to art galleries.

The marriage imploded violently when my husband’s mental problems blew out of control. An adoption breakdown resulted with the older boy we had been adopting. My ex capped the whole situation by pounding my head on the floor, nearly killing me.

Not too long after that my mother committed suicide. My father had already passed away and my brother was immersed in his own troubles. I was left on my own with a toddler, trying to recover from a severe concussion.

The one positive outcome of these events was that it became essential for my child’s well being that I pursue my artwork once again. I could support her and still be at home for her if I did.

This made an enormous difference for me as I slowly worked my way through my recovery. When I was still too ill to handle clay, I designed a line of exclusive stuffed toys I marketed to high-end toy stores.

When I was well enough, I set up my clay studio and made pots, lots of pots. The business seemed to be developing well. Unfortunately a car wreck injured my still fragile neck and ended my work on the potter’s wheel for another fourteen years.

When one door closes, another opens, and I discovered jewelry making and the lost wax process. When I saw the first examples of the process my immediate thought was that I had just saved myself ten years of searching. I had known all along I would not stay with the clay, but did not know what I would do instead.

I absorbed myself in mastering this medium with a single-minded intensity that had me commercially viable as a designer fairly rapidly. Wax, left to its own devices, likes to be blobs and drips. To control it into a precise form requires technical precision and nearly endless practice.

The medium is so demanding that most wax workers find one method of working and stick with it. I wanted to be able to do them all so that I could create whatever I wished that was physically possible in wax.

As a result I became one of the top handful of precision carving specialists in North America. I designed for the trade, meaning I would create one piece, a whole line of jewelry complete with molds, or anything in between.
I created sculptures, jewelry of every possible style, and often did custom pieces for jewelry shops. The latter became a cause of burnout.

When a shop jobs something out it is usually because it is too technically difficult for them to execute, or, worse yet, is a really bad idea they promised their customer and then discovered they had no notion how to make it work.

I found that after working so hard to become versatile and effective, a lot of my time was spent making silk purses out of sow’s ears. Poorly cut stones had to be made to look good. Bad ideas had to be made into something the customer would actually wear. I wrote in another post about the Omigod Ring, a five ounce monstrosity with diamonds and an eagle.

Along with those dismal sort of projects were more interesting ones. Have you ever thought of making a heart shaped gold padlock for a necklace? It turns out there is a reason most padlocks are rectangular. Important parts of the mechanism are in those bottom corners a heart shape does not have…

So a mechanism had to be invented that would work in a heart shape. The result was a beautiful gold padlock that opened and closed with a gold key.

Another interesting one was a project for a fossil dealer. He wanted, not a triceratops skull, but whatever the predecessor creature was, I forget the name right now. It had to be carved in three quarter relief and have a natural uncut diamond rotating in its mouth. That was both fun and challenging.

When Erte’ was still alive, Circle Fine Art began representing him. They began taking his elaborately costumed human and animal forms in his lithographs and converting them into jewelry. When they did his complex alphabet series, they could find only six of us in North America capable of rendering that level of detail. I did 12 of the letters for them.

I have won all the major Indian jewelry competitions from the Heard Museum right on down, under someone else’s name. An Indian, of course.

It was a strange business indeed. I was certainly not on the end of it where the real money making occurred, but I was a single mom and not in a position to do much about it.

Life was to take some interesting turns however, which I will cover in the next part of this series.

This article appears in Live the Power Unlimited #12, which has been a wonderful carnival indeed.

For related articles see Adventures with the Creative Muse Part One and Adventures with the Creative Muse Part Three.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

The post Adventures with the Creative Muse Part Two appeared first on Energies of Creation.

As if that was not enough, I learned how to deal with a Mac operating system and started using Adobe CS3, etc.

My physical body had some opinions about all this and offered a few ailments to get my attention. I drew deep within myself. I moved into an abiding quiet and have spent much of my time there, regardless of the outward appearance of my activities.

It is a time of endings and beginnings interwoven in disruptive tangles, a time of feeling that deep river of creation that runs through my life. For me, the creative muse has been a hard master and yet I cannot imagine life without it.

I view the lives of many of the people I know with bafflement. I am caught in the grip of a force that demands expression, and I see others plodding along, seemingly content with lives that would utterly suffocate me. I don’t know how they do it. Or why.

This creative force woke in my teens when I began to paint. My great uncle tutored me in oils. I had my troubles with it. No painting came alive until I had a major temper tantrum. No temper tantrum meant an oatmeal mush painting.

The whole problem is that the creative energy is larger than the little conscious mind, and that little conscious mind is an awful roadblock to the process. For me, a temper tantrum could bypass the little mind and I would suddenly do something I had not even imagined in a normal state of mind.

This model does work, albeit painfully. Uncle Mike himself was the master of the Lanshaw Roar, which is what the family called the behavior of my great uncles and grandfather, the Lanshaw brothers. They all used their tempers to create powerfully, and sometimes destructively.

My own immediate family was no help in this matter, being overwhelmed with their own difficulties. After all, we were four people living in a building 15’ by 22’ with no indoor plumbing and no dividing interior walls.

Actually there was no wallboard or insulation either, just bare rafters and studs with sheathing on the outside. The concrete floor had various colors of old linoleum in patchwork pattern.

My father was quite ill with bronchitis and heart trouble and my mother was a continuous temper tantrum of her own. Our house was quite the pressure cooker.

Just finding somewhere to paint in that overcrowded space was a challenge. I had a small easel I could put in position next to the kitchen table. Once absorbed in the paint, the rest of the world would mercifully disappear.

Of course, then I would discover I had perhaps gotten a bit too energetic with my little canvas and small brushes. I recall my mother going ballistic because I had splattered blue oil paint in the butter sitting on the table next to me.

I thought I had a pretty good sky going but she seemed more concerned about the butter. It really did not take much effort to clean those paint splatters off the butter.

Despite such incidents my parents usually encouraged my artwork, at least within their range of understanding.

Summers were better since I could take my pastels outdoors and draw. Once I went out in the back pasture and did a study of the woods and sky.

I had the notion of putting another image into it, long before Bev Doolittle came on the scene, and worked a woman’s face into the clouds and trees.

This went far outside my parent’s range and they just about exploded with indignation that I drew such a thing. I certainly did not do that again.

Solving my painting problems by having a temper tantrum was a pattern I could not change living in that environment. That had to wait for a later time.

For related articles see Adventures with the Creative Muse Part Two and Adventures with the Creative Muse Part Three.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.

The post Adventures with the Creative Muse Part One appeared first on Energies of Creation.

I am pleased to announce I created two new websites last week. Even though my electronic difficulties persist, at least I am getting some real work done again. I created art blogs for myself and for my husband. The urls are pretty simple, www.lexisundell.com and www.bernsundell.com.

I have quite a collection of my flower paintings showing on my site, along with commentary about the individual paintings. Giclee prints from the paintings are available with an online shopping cart.

I also wrote a couple of posts on there about my new book, Painting Acrylic Flowers A-Z, which has finally been released!

Bern’s site emphasizes fly fishing showing his trout paintings and fishing scenes. He also does Indian warriors which appear as well. His giclee prints have a shopping cart the same as mine.

I invite you to go have a look at your leisure, welcome to our art!

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2007. All Rights Reserved.

The post Announcing New Art Blogs appeared first on Energies of Creation.

That is a good thing for many reasons, including the fact that any cow patties I encounter get dug into my garden, which would probably eliminate their usefulness in a contest. If I have to choose how to use an actual cow patty, the garden will win. (Hmmm, large tomatoes in well fertilized soil, or enter a contest? Tomatoes, of course!)

While I revere cow patties for their ability to become tomatoes, cows themselves are sacred animals to many people, for reasons that totally escaped me one fine morning in my teens.

I went to my neighbor’s cow pasture to draw the sunrise at the river in pastels. These days it would be called plein air painting. Plein air painting is a process I carefully avoid now that I have some mature intelligence I occasionally use.

My first error was succumbing to my dog Tico’s desperate entreaties to be included. He was good at running along my bicycle while I held his chain. The trouble began at the electric gate. The sun was coming and I was in a hurry to get to the river to start my drawing.

I leaned over the handlebars to unlock the gate. Regrettably at that moment Tico saw a rabbit. He made a big lunge and I fell across the electric gate with my bicycle and the chain. The current zapped the dog and me both, but eventually I managed to yank the bike off the gate.

Surprisingly, the morning was able to deteriorate even further from that moment. Tico was a small dog who somehow inspired murder in the hearts of every cow in the pasture. He thought I should be his protector, which greatly interfered with my pastel work.

I could not take him home because the light of sunrise would be gone before I got back. I thought I had solved the problem when I parked my bicycle on a high bank and took the dog below to a narrow edge of riverbank. The cows could not climb down the high bank to get us.

However, one particularly murderous cow took to the water to launch a naval attack on my terrified dog. The others occupied themselves with attempting to eat the seat cover on my bicycle until they knocked the bike off the high bank, scattering my drawing papers in the river.

As you can see, the practice of plein air drawing or painting offers plenty of drawbacks. Cows can be lively participants in these drawbacks.

I had an artist friend who decided to paint a watercolor outdoors. She had to go take a phone call, and when she returned to her easel, the family cow had given the painting a big slobbery lick, destroying it.

Cows are not the only detriment to plein air work. Try bugs, wind, rain, poison ivy, and so forth. Perhaps add in a rattlesnake or skunk once in awhile.

Years ago in Arizona I was waiting to move into a house and needed to work on a painting too large to fit in the temporary trailer. That meant I had a four foot by six foot oil painting set up in the carport where the light was decent.

I had just covered the entire surface with fresh wet paint when a dust devil went through the carport, leaving bugs, sticks, and all manner of debris embedded in the paint. Some paintings might be enhanced by such textures, but this was not one of them.

Frankly, when I paint, I much prefer to concentrate on the creative process rather than fending off deranged cows and uncooperative weather effects. That is why artists have studios, right?

So I am much amused by the hype surrounding plein air painting. Oh well, to each his own.

As for cows, as I said I greatly appreciate their patties. I have found their raw milk to be extremely beneficial to my health. I still do not want any cows near my easel.

Bloggrrl posted a great photo of a woman wearing a cow costume. In fact, although she has other humorous articles such as the Three Little Blogs, the Cow Patty Bingo one is my favorite, partly because of that photo.

I wish I had a photo of a pair of pants I heard about yesterday in our gallery. One of our clients has a son who designs skateboard pants. He created a pair of pants in the black and white cowhide pattern.

Then he added pockets, not set inside the pants, but on the outside. They were pink, shaped like udders, and you could put your hands in the pockets and make your fingers wiggle the teats.

I think Bloggrrl would like those pants. If I had a pair of them, it might be worth one more foray into a pasture, just to wear them to shock the cows while I painted.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2007. All Rights Reserved.

The post Cows, Plein Air Painting, and More Cows appeared first on Energies of Creation.

I have the canvas ready. Pencil lines hint of the petal curves yet to come into being.

The phone rang early, someone in crisis. I did energy work by phone. Fortunately it did not take a long time, the day was yet young.

I went to the greenhouse on First Street to get a special cucumber plant. The lady was exhausted from doing far too much all spring, so another quick session of energy work, this time in person.

I returned home to pick up the canvas to go to the gallery and paint. I discovered my tomato plants were starting to droop before the hoop house was even hot. The tomatoes seem to want more water than normal as they are not yet well established in the ground.

So without delay I put the hose on them and deep watered the large end of the hoop house, moving the hose row by row. It is not a particularly efficient method, but it eventually got the job done.

My canvas waited motionless in the house.

Since I was home, I received the phone call asking if I still could do a wedding. When? Oh, anytime. Anytime became this evening.

This evening I had planned to mix up 30 gallons of microbe tea from the concentrate I was brewing in my aerator. As the concentrate was beginning to bubble over the sides, waiting until morning was not an option.

I walked away from my blank canvas and sprayed, poured, and otherwise distributed 30 gallons of microbe tea on, under, and around every plant in the hoop house.

Then I went in the house, cleaned up, and dressed to officiate at a wedding.

Tomorrow, I will see the golden yellows spring forth on the canvas. I will rise early and go to the gallery, keep the doors locked, and paint madly until opening time.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2007. All Rights Reserved.

The post A Blank Canvas, Still Blank appeared first on Energies of Creation.

The birth of paintings rides the waves of mystery. Something new arises, as yet unseen.

In the quiet dark before dawn, I wait.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2007. All Rights Reserved.

The post Birth of Paintings appeared first on Energies of Creation.