After a week off for loved ones and chores, I’m back in StudioKitchen today … finishing the underpainting for Winston …. and cooking fresh collards from the garden for dinner. Evidently, this is the Lockhart studio version of my personal New Year construct … always a ritual to focus on what matters most — first painting, then people, then more painting tomorrow. I realized this year how deeply important holiday habits are to me and my family. History teaches us that to destroy a culture’s rituals is to destroy its mythology … and thus its identity. Codified within my family’s holiday rituals is our living story … it has stretched and shifted over time to accommodate many lives, but it continues to play out every year. It anchors us like nothing else can — this is the real beauty of holidays with family.
So by painting today I reaffirm that beauty and artful storytelling and loved ones reign in my world. Those of you who know me, know all about the strange relationship I have with painting …. and with that side of myself. It would probably be different if I’d grown up in the arts … maybe more unified in me if that were the only side of myself that ever found expression. But coming from a conventional suburban life, the artist was a curious intruder. It’s as if I was driving a lonely backroad late on a foggy night … fog thick like dragon’s breath … and picked up a mysterious hitchhiker. He got in the car and said nothing … just rode with me all the way home and never left. I think of him now as my muse … a presence rather than a force. As a frequent visitor in my dreams, he is sometimes a white winged Archangel and sometimes a broken, weary Templar knight who somehow made his way home. He is that whisper you hear behind you, in the hairs on the back of your neck … one that feels so real, you hold your breath for a minute, and don’t want to turn around to look for fear of seeing the hitchhiker standing in your kitchen. Yikes!
Last night it was the Archangel who visited … a bit after midnight. In the dream I was sitting on my back porch with an orange sunset when he came out of the west and said “I’ll see you on the other side” … his statement was more of an instruction than a goodbye. After that he crossed over the house and the river, and came back out of the bright yellow sunrise in the east. What a terrific wowie-zowie-world-of-weird omen for the New Year, don’t you think? Out with the old; in with the exciting, creative, and beautiful NEW! I can already see two new narrative portraits that will push the boundaries for me … one features my stunning Venus model, Josie, and is already underway. The other is a Garden of Eden allegory, one I’ve been imagining for years. So thanks as always, Hitchhiker — thanks for the reassuring dream visit — and have a Happy New Year.
