Walk out into Colour

‘Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour. Do it now’.
Rumi.

Starting something new…

Sometimes you just have to start something and get your hands working. This piece started when I felt the urge to cover a large piece in yellow and use lots of colour. I then used some pastel colours in an angora silk mix with sparkles between all the layers. A thin layer of yellow mawata silk is added to hold it all down and smooth the surface.

Where is my inspiration?

At this stage I still wasn’t sure where it was going. Apart from having a Rumi quote in my head and lots of colour emotion wheels on my studio mood board

Ideas incoming!

I spent a couple of days laying things down and removing them because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. Then one evening I found myself drawing massive spirals and shell patterns on our kitchen graffiti wall (got told off by the boy because I drew on his bit!)

The next morning I had a productive studio session. Drawing a spiral out of art yarns and then carrying on to get to this shape forming. Even though none of it was fixed down yet, and I didn’t know what was coming next, it felt good to have had a proper creative session. For now I just needed a good audiobook to do the task of pinning this all in (the piece is 60cm square) before I could go crazy with another sudden ping of inspiration!

Focus and refine

As work progressed and I added more layers and lines the vortex appeared stronger and stronger. Contrast of the light yellow area in the centre to the darker areas towards the edges accentuates this. I had to be careful to graduate the light. I had ended up with too strong a contrast of light to dark so had to spend some time adding light to the dark areas and dark to the light areas.

Flashback

In the back of my mind was that this would eventually need a figure in the tunnel for focus – maybe a hare? I realised that there’s a LOT of throwback to an illustration I did in ink years ago – that one was a turtle though!

The Words

I looked up the longer version of the quote I had seen and kept it in mind as I worked on the piece. The spiral shape began to feel more like a cage with the vortex shape giving the impression of escape into the light. My choices in the work became more influenced by the words as I wanted to give them more emphasis.

“Into this new love,
die,
your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky,
take an axe to the prison wall,
escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour,
do it now.”
~ Jelalludin Rumi

What’s next?

This piece was sold to a customer at Dolphin Gallery. I’m not quite done with these words yet so I’m now in the process of making a new, larger version of ‘Walk out into Colour’! I don’t often repeat pieces but felt I still had some exploring to do with this theme. I want to see what happens if I start again on the same subject. Do I automatically do the same thing? Make it better, worse, simpler, too refined or controlled? I’ll let you know how it goes!

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