Illuminara

I spent the day in a trance, drawing babies and angels. I filmed it and put this together. The world seems so strange at times, but let’s just love the new babies being born (they see more than we do) and it will all come out right.

This is a recent Spirit Painting I did and loved doing. The feeling of gentleness and impending magic was all around me during this painting.  I felt the presence of loved ones, guides and an angelic softness all the while. There is also the expectation of something so wondrous about to unfold, yet with such [...]

I was searching through my stacks of sketchbooks going back many years. I saw this page, and it seemed to want to be seen today. This is the first day of school in Westport, and this fairy in the “Time for Change” bubble made me smile. My prayer and wish is that all the children [...]

This is a detail from the same painting as yesterday’s post, this one focusing on youth and fashion, and “looking to the past” before making choices. In a society such as ours where youth is revered and elderly people are largely shunted away or ignored, you realize we lose so much information that would help [...]

Remembering summers when Grandma’s wore high heals and gloves, carried pocket books and had permed hair. There were distinct roles people played, and they had clothes that went along with those roles. Grandmas wore floral dresses or something signaling “Matriarch”, and uncles wore suits and smoked pipes. I know these are generalizations, but they are [...]

I love drawing around town. People are beautiful in their places, mostly without being aware of it. The light at Compo Beach in summer in particular is to me one of the most unexpected surprises (where you live usually does not carry that kind of mystique, but The Sound at Compo is especially pink on [...]

This is a Spirit Painting I was commissioned to do recently. Sabina Walton asked me to meditate on her and create a painting while entering this prayer state. I was honored and am blessed to have been asked to do this. I was, as always when regarding another in this spiritual way, very moved by [...]

This is a sketch (pencil with watercolor) that I did of my youngest son when he was about 3 years old. I wanted to capture the beauty of small hands making marks. Facing a blank piece of paper is a very dynamic thing to do. That blank paper says, “What are you going to activate [...]

At breakfast, I always ask, “What did you dream?” and then I usually talk about whatever it was I dreamed. This morning the boys looked sleepy at breakfast, as they usually do. I drew them as they ate, and I realized that no matter how old they are now, they look like they’re very little [...]

 
Susan Farewell inspires me. In my mind, I see her as a kind of iconic Travel Dynamo: tall, Swedish and dashing off to anywhere on earth, or the moon maybe. I asked her to contribute to Illuminara by telling me what inspired her to become a person who roams the globe and writes about it [...]