It’s hard to put into words what is going on in this season of my life. It has been such a long season of waiting on God. When you are waiting, it so easily feels like nothing is being accomplished, like you are stationary, or even drifting backwards. BUT. But God. God has this remarkable way of doing things without us even realizing they are happening. And I think He actually works best that way, because we aren’t getting in the way of the process. I believe there are certain things in our life, in our character, in many things, that can only be accomplished when we are waiting on God. When we are in a season when He has called us to do something, or given us a promise, and we are waiting and believing for Him to bring it to pass in our lives. We can get caught in a bit of an emotional roller coaster. The devil tries to come in, much like with Eve…. “did God really say..??” And then it comes down to us. We have to answer that question. We have to determine in our hearts if we imagined the voice of God and if all those confirmations He sent along the way were just in our imagination. We do, for the most part, know that we aren’t crazy or imagining things, which then boils things down to.. can we wait? Or do we try to plow ahead and make things happen in our own strength, or just abandon it all together and try again for the promise some other time? I think it’s like the wilderness season with the Israelites, and the amount of times we have to go around the mountain is determined by our willingness to learn what He wants to teach us, and on us waiting on Him to do what He said He would do.

That wasn’t what I came to talk about, but maybe it will help someone. I wanted to talk about working in a series. I often work with similar motifs over and over again, but I don’t often work the same motif over again, and I really feel like there is value in doing that. I have been watching Helen Wells’ process on youtube lately and have been so inspired by her art journals. She often works with the same motif over and over again and I can see the profound affect that it has had on her work. So I have decided to try and incorporate this idea into my own practice and wanted to share what I am working on so far.

I often sit and work on some art in the evening. It is often random and unrelated to anything else.. just whatever I feel inspired by in the moment. Doing a series is a way to try and focus and narrow in on an idea. I have a bunch of old book pages leftover from making art journals and honestly this first series was birthed accidentally when I was doodling on these one evening. I was looking at some botanical art and made a quick sketch which looked nothing like the inspiration photo, but I liked it, so I decided to try making it again, but in a way that would fill the paper.

Later when I was wanting to paint something on canvas, I decided to use the second version of the book page art as inspiration again. The painting didn’t come out quite how I was envisioning, so I set it near my bed and stared at it over a period of time until I was inspired to work on it again. It’s still not exactly where I want it, and so I decided to take to an art journal to try some more variations there to see if I can eventually arrive at what I had initially intentioned. All in all, it was a bit of an accidental venture into series work, but I like the idea of not ‘reinventing the wheel’ as Helen says, and just using one idea until you feel you’ve accomplished what you hoped to. And in the meantime, who knows what you could discover! I have had so many limiting ideas about art in my mind, I have no idea where I picked them all up, but I really feel like the biggest thing that God has done for my art is changing my mind. It changes everything!

Thanks for stopping by!