the wild woman

i don't talk much here about my painting...

which i have no excuse for really apart from the fact that the things i usually write about here seem blindingly important and i rush to come here...

but i am going to try to explain this wonderful awful woman who arrived

there is a back story

of course

i am (as you may know if you have read here before) and inveterate people pleaser

i try to be a nice girl. i try to be polite. i try to be thoughtful. i try to be good.

But the secret is i have a tail that as Clarissa Pincola Estes so rightly points out, often twitches below the hem of my skirt. Of course this makes me ashamed. It fits none of the categories above.

i have a nose that smells danger but no training as to what to do with the knowledge. To run from danger might be considered rude.

I have eyes that see in the darkest of places but because they often see what no one else sees i stitch my lips together in a sweet smile so that the ugly things i see don't spill out and aren't offensive to others...

These things have made me feel other all my life

lonely

troubled

odd

i have limped around the world looking for the place i knew i belonged - somewhere surely, there were others who smelled like me, howled like me, saw like me...

I found my family once or twice - my beloved Daryl who gave me the gift of Clarissa Pincola Estes and women who run with the wolves... but i felt so bouyed up by this connection, this homecoming that i thought i was strong enough to go back to the world of the others without protection

it almost sunk me

and so it was by sheer fate that i happened on the SARK forum, kindreds, kindness and clarity all in one pick and mix bag.... seeing other women struggle and follow their hearts was so enriching, so enlivening that i began to do the same

from there i found online art courses...especially the ones with Connie Hozvicka i began to invest in my dreams

i found, by the blessings of all that is holy and the faeries who live in the Whangarei Library shelves Elizabeth Cunningham and Maeve, they are my heart's friends and i live daily heart filling contact with them..

i have done a course with Pixie Campbell on the medicine of plants and stone people and travelling around the points, teaching me to trust my intuition, my deepest knowings....

and i found my way back to Clarissa and that old yellowed underlined book

and the wild woman howled at me from the pages... a howl of welcome and feirceness and blood

i found this video on line

and so i took to my canvas with the gesso for texture and orange red and vermillion because i knew that she was calling herself out...

calling out the wild woman

calling out the parts of me that hear to much see too much feel too much are too much for all the buttoned down goodwoman bullshit i have been expecting myself to be constrained by for all these long lonely years

and out she came, in scratches with brushes and leaves and nails, with swoopy strokes of thick globbed paints and tiny dabs of gentle colour

here she comes

she scares me and challenges me and dares me and taunts me

and really she is me

and as Elizabeth Cunningham says "It's not all pretty pretty pretty, beauty never is"