Magic, The Space In Between

Artists have this concept of negative space, negative space is the area that surrounders the object, the space between the slots of a chair, sometimes we even do an exercise where we specifically draw the negative space instead of the chair. This exercise is one of the many exercises that trains the artist eye to see. You naturally filter out alot of information because otherwise you would be very overwhelmed most of the time, from the bright lights, the itchy tag in your shirt and the hum of the fan, to name a few things and to be come a good artist you have to retrain your eyes to see what is really there and what an object actually looks like, both the object and the space around it.

I remember an art teacher asking what color the grass is and most of class shouting out green and the teacher then asking us to look again, she had taken us outside on our first or second class of my Drawing 101 class in college, the teacher then asked us to look again, you too reader go look again, look more closely, it often is green but also yellow and tan and bit purple and bit blue if its crabgrass and if you really want to get specific, the green is often not a true green but a hooker's green, a sap green and also maybe some green yellow, you can see white tips, little purple flower blossoms on the grass , what grass has flowers, yep it looks like wheat. You have to learn to silence the mind who wants to tell you what you are seeing, the mind often gets it wrong because it is going based on what its thinks it should look like, what it thinks it sees, what it knows based on past experience and filtered information not the present moment, not the actual subject before your eyes.

I have always been a deep deep feeler, it has been very overwhelming at times but I also have had the miracle of a Grandma and Mother and an Aunt too who loved art. My Grandma painted watercolors as along as I can remember and was the first person to buy me high quality paintbrushes and paper and watercolors and an art book. I never touched them because I was afraid of breaking them. I still made alot of art with cheaper supplies and in school and such. My grandma also bought me a subscription to Cricket magazine, a childrens literary magazine and I would skip right over the stories and go straight to the art submitted by children. My mom had a large collection of books on impressionism and artists and some Picasso thrown in and I remember pulling them out and looking at them once in while on the cold floor of our living room, looking at Renoir's Cafe Paintings. She would volunteer to be "picture person" a parent volunteer who came in to my elementary class and taught art enrichment to students- highlighting an artist and then leading an interactive art making activity -usually an inspired artwork by a specific artist like Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. She signed me up for every summer art class and camp I ever took some without my request so she just knew I liked art and quietly supported my interests. I never thought of my mother as artist or even art admirer because she seemed so practical and had a job as a school nurse and I never saw her paint or draw or have any person interest in making art but obviously I wasn't seeing clearly, or all of her, because she clearly did have an interest in it. And finally, my Aunt I was excited to learn in when I was a teenager was a Art Major in college and once a while I would see her sketch as hobby as a child, it was relief to me because of frequent feelings of being an alien or adopted family member in my immediate family for being more inclined to useless subjects such as art and english compared to my dad and brother who both were very into computers, science, math and really techincal studies that I had little interest in unless it had some art or story rich angle like art making computer programs or story rich video games like King's Quest 7.

So I kinda became an artist or maybe I always was one and maybe I was born from them. The painting that I picked for this blog cover I call Deep Waters. I sketched it at night after returning from my last trip to my grandma's house in February 2021, I made it to illustrate how full of grief I felt. In 2019 I lost my mom suddenly, my dog and then covid happened which felt like another total detonation of normal after my life as knew it was already in splinters from my moms death and then in October of 2020 my Grandma died another loss and with it meant the lost of my grandma's home the place of summer childhood vacations- memories full of trips to Chicago, trains, Portillos!, Da Bears, Da Cubs, Chicago Tavern Pizza, John Candy and John hughes movies, 90 degree sweltering july days, fireworks, my Uncle Donnie's 4th of July birthday cake melting in the kitchen, padio sitting, me sitting in the back of a car as my grandma, mom and aunt drove around looking people's houses they once knew and me bored but still absorbing all of it and so much laughing.

In 2026 february I was inspired to make a large version of this drawing after attending a church group going over the book Strong like Water by Aundi Kolber because I realized how much art has been a refuge , and a safe container for all I feel. The book Strong like Water explores being soft open to connection and even risking feeling our feelings as a strength instead of how society often depicts these things as a weakness. I really struggle with saying all I got to say in few words-but the gist of it that come up with. the gist of who I am and my greatest struggle has been in life is..."I feel so freaking* much." - it feels viseral not all the time but it often knocks me off my feet, it feels like being near high quality speakers where not only is it surround sound but you feel the bass and the hum of the music vibrations, its sensory input, lights, clothes textures and room temperature and its also emotion, my emotion , your emotion, the emotion envoked by a painting or a song.

Its not always a bad thing, it can be really fun, watching my brother laugh with his whole body at a rollercoaster car toy or screaming with joy when his favorite movie comes on, its magic but it also can be overwhelming and I think it has actually contributed to my ADHD like symptoms because my system sometimes gets flooded and what happens to me is I just get zapped of energy, my body vibrates, my mind is foggy, and I cant focus on anything. when I was a kid I would get headaches, stomach aches and ask to go to office where sometimes my mom would come get me but I also remember alot of times would just decompress and trace the cold cement blocks in the office until I felt my system calm down, my quiet stillness fill my body again and my headache would go away and I would go join my class where ever they were. So I feel alot.

I have finally accepted it and also kinda figured out how to handle it too because if I dont move it or regulate it or whatever you want to call it, it turns me to a frozen, numb depressed anxious ridden person even with all the crying I still did.

So this drawing I made and then made into a painting this year, Deep Waters, created by my lost of my grandma and all my losses it came back up in my awareneess through this Strong Like Water group and I made it into a full fledge painting because I realize art was my refuge but also because the author posed a question, what is a quality that I felt like was a major contributor to my childhood trauma or caused me to live in survival mode - survival mode is living in a burned out, buzzing and numbed state because you feel like you have too, because you dont have any other way, because other ways are not allowed or you dont know a better way or dont have resources or because sometimes it is really is not safe to be soft. What quality was a major contributor to your childhood trauma and survival mode and also might have served you, saved you I read from my journal. My answer, I immediately realized, how much my sensitivity and deep feeling was my weakness both sometimes in my family and in society and in school -it felt like a curse at times, sometimes that it might just take me under even before my significant losses AND it is also my ability to feel and sensitivity that allowed me to heal too- it was highlighting my capacity and strength to hold emotion and NEVER WAS JUST MY WEAKNESS. My own ability to feel, was my ability to hold space and be my own refuge, my deep feeling and sensitivity healed me. And so my Deep Waters painting was also showing my own capacity for healing. And I got more. Like I said I have never been one to have few words. I am either quiet because I am too absorbed in something, overwhelmed, or cant find words but when I am talking you won't get me to stop. On to my point.

Today I had a surprise unplanned writing session with my deep and dear friend Nicole who I have often refer to as my fairy godmother, who showed up in my life after the death of my brother Noah-Joy Embodied in 2017. We were both were feeling sad because of the upcoming mother's day weekend, we both have lost our mothers and we both feel so deeply and often need deep connect. She has helped me unlock my words. In our writing session we shared poems and wrote what the poems inspired us to write, something we have been doing weekly for about a year or two, once a week, sometimes two times a week. I wrote about alot of things, declaring I am an artist and that to be an artist is to feel, to love and to create but what I want to share was this.

I miss deep gut hysterical laughing-something common at my grandma house. Everything was a cause for ruckcus laughter, my cousin doing Ace Ventura impressions, my aunts silly habit of risking her life by eatng stray food off ( please dont be mad at me for sharing this) the floor only to be cured by picking up a popcorn kernal only to discover it was a baby dog tooth from my teething fox terrior puppy Zeke. My mom and aunt opening up guestionable expired can of soup to discover it a muscus green color and off putting chemical scent, and they would laugh all the way to trash to throw it out.

I miss someone reaching over to stroke my hair and softy sort it into braidable tendrils - my mom.

My grandma, I am just realizing I was mildly afraid of, she just had a don't mess* with me attitude about her but her singing her favorite folk songs, sharing an interesting story she read in the paper -her Chicago Tribune or her laughing at my mom and aunt's joke even when it was at her expense would quickly burst this feeling in me but I miss the surprise of her reach over and stroking my arm when I was little 8 years old sitting on couch in the evenings as we watched a movie or Chicago Evening News.

As I cry. I see a christmas morning at my own childhood home in Michigan with crisp snow and vibrant red frosted winter berries on a tree , an open American Girl baby doll with handmade clothes from my grandma. My grandma and mom with me in a church pew. I see the glowing nights of making christmas cookies in the anticipation of their arrival. I see my grandma's light blue shirt and her flowy soft pants and gold watch , so elegent always, soft powdery perfume fills the air, as she fills a leather chair in my family room and drinks her morning orange juice.

I miss being surrounded by laughing angels. I miss women and I miss my brother Noah. I miss them and I see them in this love light, them rematerialize before me in my minds eye but also I want some more light embodied in my life. I want to belly laugh again. I want to feel someone reach out and brush hair out of my eyes. I miss them. I miss them. I miss them. I love them. I love them. I love them.

When I closed this writing session after crying my eyes out - I just let myself feel all the feels and plot doing what I now do after a emotional day which is to just move softly. Feeling so much doesn't even really bother me that much anymore, I still feel all the feels but I just let it pass through me like a thunderstorm, watching, so much so that sometimes I find myself laughing at it, as another spell of sobbing bubbles up after three rounds, or just riding out an anxiety attack , gripping the seat so to speak until it passes like going through a car wash or the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka -"There’s no earthly way of knowing ,Which direction we are going" or two day spell of feeling very overstimulated from ignoring my own needs to listen to my body only to watch myself get flooded and go into what feels like nonverbal or frozen NPC( frozen computer game character) mode. I still feel sad and I let myself cry, I just let it flow and do whatever I need to do when I feel so much. And I was collecting myself and still missing my mom and grandma and childhood essentially and wanting someone to reach out and brush my hand. And I got to thinking ( I never do that-just kinding-I do it alot), my fairy godmother Nicole whisper in my ear - let the chair hold you, let the blanket brush your hand and I looked at my Deep Waters painting.

What I really want to say is, what if the negative space around us -is not negative, I mean the artists call it negative because its our minds tells us its empty, it looks empty, its empty space between objects and us. What if the negative space, is positive, by positive I mean, full, where the stuff that cant be seen is, what can only be felt. What if we have been filtering out something that has always been there but our mind won't let us fully know or accept. Then I heard the song "Love is Around us" play in my head, "I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes. Love is always around and so the feeling grows. Its written on the wind , its everywhere I go, so if you really love me come on and let it show....there's no beginning, there'll be no end and on my love you can depend" a song my mother would frequently sing out loud around me. I still am laughing on my couch.

One last thing, Deep Waters-an image for grief, an image for capacity of feeling and then after I painted it and let it sit around and me looking at it from time to time, I don't always follow understand my own paintings-its a true story. I realized that it was also an image of a spirit hugging her sadness or feeling or it could be what can't be seen, what eyes have not yet allowed us to see. That we are everything, the mind, the body , the spirit and the space in-between.

*subsitute for a bigger swear word, I will let you imagine what it is.