The Dance of the Sunflower Warrior, a triptych, 72×30 Acrylic, embodies my passions of yoga, painting, movement, and flowers.
I often paint sunflowers with the warrior pose in mind.
To me, sunflowers are symbols of strength, empowerment, TRANSITION, and beauty. All of this is necessary here … right now!
In yoga, the Dancing warrior is a beautiful breath-synchronized sequence that flows from one pose to the next warming up the entire body, strengthening, and releasing tension. Most of all it shifts my mind right onto my yoga mat and away from the noisy world. When I’m on my yoga mat, I’m moving my body and I’m also painting the movement of my brush.
If you have been following my work, you will notice that there are layers underneath all the paint that become part of the process that transform the work I create.
I call it working from the inside to the outside. And then from the outside in.
Here’s what I mean in this piece … The painting inside is of me doing what I love and gives me strength – my yoga practice. The black lines of paint that I use change the image into something else entirely different. My process is trusting my inner guide to place those black lines over an existing piece and allowing the magic of the composition to appear. When you’ve been practicing something for many years, it naturally occurs.
After the composition has confidently appeared, I paint from the outside in. In this case, I painted a cerulean blue in all of the negative space to cover up all the noise of the piece underneath.
I was tempted to call the painting finished at this point because I found it quite stunning at this stage in the process.
But I’m a colorist. Choosing a color palette and mixing those colors makes my heart sing. Moving my brush on the canvas, adding in a color that I know will move the eye in a certain direction feels like a dance to me… I’m the choreographer when I set my paintbrush free.