Finger Painting ~ Small gift to my Mother

Yesterday I went to my bookshelves and selected The Nine Muses: A Mythological Path to Creativity by Angeles Arrien. I opened to a random page and landed on Erato: Muse of Love Poetry.

 

I love this quote that she has in the margin of the page to begin this section:

 

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination

—Voltaire

 

Nature’s canvas is stenciled into my being, and if I could wander the hills everyday for hours and lose myself in Nature and my imagination, I would turn into a bumblebee or a butterfly. But I take every bit I can stuff into my imaginary pockets. The long slender pods that hang from trees that I don’t know the name of; the bees buzzing from flower to flower in search of nectar; the small cracks in the street where small lakes of grass have nestled themselves into the pavement. This isn’t just a regular linear crack. It’s a miniature square patch and it could easily be a pendant for a necklace. When the rains come, I know just where that particular crack is and I will be sure to walk to where it is near the gas station at the intersection. It’s not my usual path any longer, so I’ll have to make a special trip. And last night I heard the honk of the Canadian Geese. I don’t usually hear them at night. It was the most comforting sound, like a church bell that had caused me to take pause, to breathe, to smile, to feel at home.

 

I’ve had a desire to make an “artist’s date”—a paint date—with myself for several months now. I’ve wanted to take the acrylic paints out of their box, buy a new canvas, and paint away. I want to feel the brush in my hands, squeeze the paints out of their tubes, smell them, feel the textures from the brush to the canvas, and watch the colors interact. I want to become the paint.

 

When I was a little girl, I always wanted to play with my finger paints. Mother wouldn’t let me finger paint as often as I would have liked. I understand that it was probably a bother, the process of setting up the paper, watching that I didn’t make a mess and then she would have to help me clean up.

 

The combination of landing on Erato, thinking of painting, and my memory of finger painting as a child, this morning I was pulled to doodle a finger drawing using an App called Doodle Buddy. That’s the photo that you see here.

 

A small gift to my mother, filled with love, sent to her during the month of October, the anniversary month of her death.