Spring Creation

Let's Play: back and forth with oil pastel and watercolor

In the upcoming Saturdays I will have the new experience of working with young people to create images of Easter. Their ages range from 7 to 17+. We are going to be thinking about some of my favorite subjects: creating and perceiving; and how those two things are intertwined.
      I've been dwelling in this milieu already because every Lent I read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  The story of Mary Lennox's and Colin Craven's transformation gives me the annual conviction to throw off the clogging mantle of old, crippling and wrong-headed ideas and habits. Incrementally, I am nudged into seeing the world afresh. It is also an excellent narrative about perception, objective and subjective and how we can begin to see things more clearly and completely.

This change is not instant or "cheap". It is slow and deep. Often, it happens in a hidden fashion, not to be seen until the life force pushes to the surface, like daffodil bulbs in Spring.

Lenten Growth, 10 x 8", oil pastel and watercolor

   We will be working with watercolor and oil pastel, a medium that I have not used extensively. So, I will be playing and experimenting, too. Spring!

My hope is that through the creation of our Easter images, these young people will feel the beauty of seeing the world clearly and also the enchantment and poetry of their own particular vision.  Only a start is possible, of course, with our small project. Still, I am looking forward to seeing their world in Spring.