I stuffed as many tubes of paint as I could squeeze into my dry bag. I sealed the wet color tightly shut because I didn’t want a repeat of last time. Last time, almost one year ago now, I boarded a fast boat that flew me across the channel between Bali and Nusa Lembogan. When I unpacked my bags on the other side, there was paint all over my clothing. To this day, you can still see a turquoise stain on my orange running shoes. The ocean also took away six of my freshly created paintings, the chakra series I made on the beach in Nusa Ceningan. This was a little disaster for the artist in me so I took special precautions this time as I traveled on the fast boat to Gili Air. The paint went inside the dry bag. The canvases were tucked tightly in the very very bottom of the bag, beneath everything else. I was still feeling rusty with color. I barely wanted to paint actually. My mind had been so deeply in the flow of words, writing a novel for months and months.
On the tiny island of Gili Air, just off the coast of the much larger Indonesian island of Lombok, I moved into a white cottage by the sea. I could see both the sun and the moon in the sky at the same time. A palm tree towered above my patio garden. Inside the white fence, I stripped down to naked skin and spread out six canvases. Now, I had a bag full of paint and I didn’t really know what to do with it. I dumped it out and organized the tubes into a rainbow. I can always rely on the rainbow.
Painting had always been a way for me to release pent up emotions but as I sat before the blank canvas I didn’t feel any. I was cleansing myself through written word and feeling rather purified and calm. I was at a loss for where to begin so I decided to just make a mess. I squirted red and pink paint on the top left canvas. Orange on the top middle and yellow on the top right. Then along the bottom row went the green, blue and purple. Each canvas started as one color and then quickly, I move the brush along from canvas to canvas, mixing and blending them so they each hold all of the colors. This is the beautiful thing about painting for me; sometimes it’s a huge emotional release and sometimes it’s just color play. I am reminded of my childhood playing with fingerpaints and Playdough. Not everything in life needs to be so serious. Even fingerpainting mess can be beautiful in the eyes of the beholder and worth the purchase from a fancy art collector. The art flows through us in many different ways. What took five messy minutes for the artist to birth might bring five hundred years of joy to the viewer.
The second collection of images I created in Indonesia in 2023.
Originals and prints are available for sale in my online shop.
Studio members get to bid on paintings first.
Love & Rainbows,
Cha Wilde