The past week has been an intense time of creating and then celebration of the final work of art. I thought a lot about creation and the process that we went through.
This is not about the process of creation with a capital C. I give the glory to God of the Process of Creation.
The six banners that I was in charge of producing for our church celebration of the Easter Vigil were pretty much painted in just six days. Not really enough time, but that is how it had to happen. I began sketching them out and measuring the 5 ' width by 12 ' length here at home in my studio and across my entire living and dining room ( I pushed or removed all the furniture).
I had a couple of days to use our church hall to paint on long tables, using big jars of acrylics from a hobby store. I haven't ever painted anything this large and it took some learning to mix the colors and figure out the size of brush that worked best. I ended up favoring a 2 1/2" house painting brush.
During this week I had lots of help from volunteers and family members for which I am very grateful.
Wednesday night I had to move everything, wet banners and bowls of paint mixtures back to my house to finish because the church hall was being used for Holy Week services! All the work had to be finished and ready to hang by the end of Friday night as the work team had to set up for the Saturday night service by midnight Friday night. It was a frenzy during the day on Friday! And then, it was all over, I couldn't do another thing about it. As the artist I suffered some misgivings when I lost a bit of control over how the final product looked. It wasn't quite what I would have envisioned at the end. Another valuable learning experience.
It was a truly joyous moment in the church service when the banners rose with the readings from Genesis that evening. I enjoyed the reaction from the congregation immensely.
How rarely does an illustrator have a big audience to respond noisily and enthusiastically to her work?
Now it is Monday morning and I have to clean up my studio and a huge mess. This mess is so colorful I took a picture of it.
