10 Year Anniversary: The Painting Diary Day 3 of 30
Painting Diary Day 3 of 30: Atomic Tree, 2010
Just before Christmas 2009 I ended a 10-year relationship that was no longer serving either of us. It was one of the hardest choices I ever had to make and moving into 2010 I was feeling a little out to sea and overwhelmed by the long healing process that lay ahead of me…
With perfect timing, a few months later I found my way into my first ayahuasca ceremony, and was blasted into a period of dramatic growth and change. While this painting was started before I took that fateful drink, it definitely incapsulates what happened to me on that night.
It took me well into 2010 to finish this painting and to be honest, I burned out on it and left it, intending to finish it later but never touched it again. It’s a classic example of the saying ‘a painting is never finished, only abandon.’ Now when I see it I don’t know what more I planned to do to it and it feels done.
Atomic Tree illustrates exactly what happened in my creative sphere when the concept was first worked out in Photoshop one afternoon. I was only exploring the similarities between a mushroom cloud and a tree. I had the tree all painted and was feeling pretty satisfied and ready to move on when a little voice in my head asked, ‘so, what do the roots look like on an atomic tree?’ Huh, I said to myself, extending the canvas down in Photoshop so that there was nothing but a long stretch of black below the ground level. With a thick white brush I quickly made a bold downward stroke through the middle of the painting from the base of the tree, off the bottom of the canvas. It was a move that literally produced a blast of excitement in me, it was like a lightbulb going off, it was that AH-HA! moment that we long for as artists.
On a larger scale this painting became the force that would blast me into the future. I was surprised that I painted it. It seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a gift that just suddenly appeared in my studio. The concept was purely from my subconscious. Atomic Tree again represents my love of duality, of life and death and of symbolic nature. This painting hangs in the entry way of our home and ten years later, remains one of my personal favorites.
Atomic Tree Oil Painting, 2010