Abstract Reality

What if what I see isn't there?

I pour myself into colors, thick texture, unnamed forms lightly tempered by lines. 

I am not very interested in representing any particular reality. 

Instead I am lured by splashes of color, mysterious journeys to places in my head and heart that I have absolutely no idea how to get to. Or how I got there once I arrive. 

I sometimes wonder why I am painting such uncertainty.  

Am I wasting perfectly good paints and paper with no guarantee? 

That's about as easy to answer as Am I wasting love? 

All that risk and we still dive deep.

While I was painting today I had an urge to travel to Paris just so I could shop at the Sennlier Art Store. 

The clerks wear white coats and the old wood floors creak when you walk on them. 

You can gaze outside the large windows to the Seine across the street. 

I would absolutely travel 7 hours and a 40 minute Metro ride to pull out drawers of pastels and oil bars in every conceivable color and size. 

Walk up the spiral staircase and caress reams of paper. 

Close my eyes and inhale rapture.

Then sit at a cafe with my Sennlier bag and smile at passersby. 

In case you are wondering why I am writing in poetry and not prose. 

Constructing paragraphs feels too tedious. 

I want to do more with less. 

Which is strange because I love meandering through dense forests of words threading together sentences but something inside me stops short these days.

If I had to guess I would say I lost my threshold for enormity when my mom died. 

My sense of time has been altered. There just isn't as much of it.

I suppose I am still reeling from the fact you never see someone again.

I wonder how to hold onto her and let her go. 

Where does her essence reside? That much debated place I have no real opinion about?  

It is all so abstract. The only concrete thing is the wall I am up against. 

Ticking clocks. Blank paper waiting for me to commit.

Swells of color receding and rising like the ocean tides. 

Each painting is a prayer. I whisper to her make this right.

She would shake her head and tell me to do what I am meant to do.

Go to Paris and buy pastels. Or China Camp. Or Greece. 

Wherever. 

Whatever it takes.

Paint abstracts, old buildings, nudes, landscapes. 

As long as you are my daughter the artist.