January 2015
Patty Waldin
Painting—when not merely employed as a system of technical rendering, but as a form of authentic Self-expression—can become a meditative process: a creative retreat which offers us vast possibilities for evolving unforeseen images of insight. When that illusory “Magic” enfolds our dancing brushes, images are evoked that awaken a different sense of reality—Forms are revealed and recognized rather than crafted by our arbitrary invention. Numinous connections with the vastness of inner knowing that lies ever-waiting beneath the surface of our daily concerns.
Born in mystery, we all too often manage to drown our wonder, obliterate through doingness, and press through our midlife to the chatter of our own inner multitudes. “Monkey mind” must be hushed in our studios.
Meditative painting provides strokes that support a treading of the waters of the mystery. A process that is both fascinating and calming.
By non-willfully groping, assessing, and redirecting the technical elements of mass and void, shadow and illumination, warmth of hue and chill of tint texture and glaze, visual metaphors materialize, much like out-of-body-experiences by which we can better understand our sacred calling.
By persisting through my own decades of unforeseen metaphysical images, I have slowly evolved a kind of personal iconography—perhaps not worthy of the sophisticated critic’s eye—but surely as efficient as an author’s private journal to chronicle a glimpse here and there, as I found my way out of shadows and chaos along the painter’s path of color and light, frozen out of this vast impermanence of time.