Me and the Wild thing

Usually it’s a statement, “You should sell your art!”

Sometimes it is a question, “Why don’t you sell your art?”

Questions of this nature bemuse and flatter.  I am puzzled because I know I am not particularly good.  I am charmed because perhaps they feel what I felt while painting.

I married the most intelligent, brilliant and handsome man.  We live a life of adventure, friendship and beauty.  Life, work, pets, dinner, dishes –most of these daily tasks bring me happiness and satisfaction.

Despite this incredible life... there is something restless inside me.  And I feel I understand people who fight to live happily while sharing space with something inside them.  When ‘this’ rises up inside, I must rise to greet it.  If I do not, if I decide to ignore or fight it, 'it' and it's rip tide of need will shred my sanity.  You see, inside of me, there is a wild thing. 

The last few weeks were on fast forward and I haven’t painted At All in over three weeks.  Not one sketch or doodle.  My hands began to hurt first; I started to clench and flex them in my sleep.  Next my eyes start to look hungry in the mirror.  Now I am half listening to people around me, half of me checked out in distraction. This growing, hyperventilating need to pull into myself; to sit alone in a grove of trees found only in my head -it is about to consume me.  This starved feeling had begun to torch all other feelings into ash –my nightly dreams become a frantic race to my imagined trees and as I nearly reach  them - the morning alarm again goes off.

Early this morning, still short on time, thinking about a lunch I haven’t packed, a phone call from a recruiter, my boss’s email, a class I need to take a look at, laundry in the dryer –Instead, for a moment, I went outside to watch Lone Peak disappear in the oncoming storm.  I watched the cloud cover expand, thick and wet, as it draped across the mountain and I listened to the softest smallest wind breathe….please…

Two hours later I took twenty minutes to lay a base of blues, purple, grey and greens on a stark white naked canvas.  I cannot tell you how it feels, I can try:  It is oxygen flooding into my hands, a feeling of water and wind in my lungs and my terrible torturing tension eases. 

You see, I am not a religious person and I am not fond of the idea there could be a guy in a beard hanging out in clouds, delivering bizarre rules.  However I do believe in the Wind Woman. I believe in the prophetic powers of sunflowers, dreams and instincts.  

Here is the complication about selling my art:  Each painting is a spell I cast using paint to reflect the light breaking in my soul; I cast out an imagined silver and gold net to draw in emotion, the moment, the point of view I am seeing. 

I have always hung them where I live so every time I walk in, I rest when I see them.  The wild thing relaxes.  Safety, beauty; the intangible threads of my life woven into these small bright windows.  It doesn’t matter to me if they are good or correctly scaled or controversial and strange.   They are me.  I painted them for the purpose of existing.  I painted them because it made me smile.  If they make someone else smile that is exciting!  Because they felt what I felt and I have successfully expressed my truth; We are all connected, no one is as alone as they think, wish or fear. 

How do I sell that?  What is the right price tag?