My Tree of Life- Contorted Willow

This is how it starts. A memory, a vision, a silly sketch with a pencil. This month's assignment in an online course is nothing less than The Tree of Life. The Kabbalistic one....oh, the chutzpah of it all! We were told to meditate and see what kind of tree appeared, which for me was the contorted willow I sat under from the age of 9 to 19. But before I raced to google image search, our teacher said for us to draw our vision. Yeah. Rightio. No problem for beginner me to sketch what a contorted willow looks like with it's twisted trunk, twisted branches and twisted leaves. So I decided to go the stylized route and made a braided trunk that unraveled down below for roots and above for branches.

Then we began the usual process for this teacher: write an intention onto the canvas to "inform" it. Followed by a using a red thread to mark off the distance between the s'phirot of the tree and then draw some or all of the paths between them. One odd thing for me was that I was moved to sign it with my entire birth name for the first time since...well...never mind how many decades!

If you can't read it, I wrote "My intention: to grow deeper roots and join more fully the grove I've chosen to be part of (here in the Twin Cities) and To deepen my Jewish spiritual path (which apparently I'm still on)

and, as I said, I signed my whole name, but I'm resisting typing it. Still have a name phobia.

Time to start playing with color! I just wanted greens. Yellow greens, blue greens, green greens. And even though I knew there would be layers, I was still hoping for lots of greens in the finished painting...which didn't happen exactly. Not that I'm really finished with it.

This part was fun! I used a water soluble charcoal pencil for the intention this time after a disastrous encounter with the other kind in another painting I'll blog about someday. It took forever to cover up the charcoal in that other painting, but this time the words just disappeared into the paint like I wanted.

Oh how I loved this!! So swirly with almost flames spinning off the circle, but....then I glazed and it all changed drastically. I miss this version a lot.

I almost danced as I painted this and I used both hands at once. One paintbrush loaded with blue green and one with yellow green. Then I took yellow and swirled around in all the empty places, picking up a bit of green now and then.

This felt so alive, and then I took a watery magenta which I thought would just softly cover and tint a bit, but instead, it flattened the whole thing out.

Yikes! Looks like a big mushroom creature out to destroy the world. I was NOT happy and where did all the swirls go?? I put a lot of blue green swirls in the middle, but didnt' take a picture of that stage. I was in too much of a hurry to put my braided tree on it so that I didnt' throw the whole canvas out the window.

I'm still hoping to bring more green back, but it did not feel happy at this point. The painting, that is. Neither one of us.

Stupid glazing.

Oh thank heavens! the blue swirls helped a bit, and the sort of fleshy color I used to sketch with was kind of cool. White would've been too glaring, and a dark color would've taken away what little light I still had.

I still missed my green, and it looked more like a dance of ribbons than like a tree at this point.

But at least I didn't hate it. I outlined the branches with a blue green and the trunk and roots with brown and then went a bit crazy putting all the roots in. Guess I really really want to feel rooted right now. No surprise after 7 years of living like a tumbleweed.

I filled in the trunk a little with a couple of different browns, but it looked more like challah than a tree. Yes, that's Jewish, but not what I had in mind. So I brought out the yellow to see what would happen and put some more colors into the branches, roots and trunk.

I experimented wiht a few wiggly leaves too, and ended up making them detached. This is where I got the inspiration to put the Hebrew letters on my tree. In the Kabbalah, the letters are assigned to different paths between the s'firot (spheres) which I hadn't even put on yet. So I lightly drew the circles and placed each letter on or near where the paths would be. I wanted them hanging on a branch, so sometimes they ended up a bit to the side of where the path would go, IF I decided to put the diagram on top of my tree.

I stepped back and I swear the yellow inside the trunk pulsated. Really! I never wanted to put the hidden sphere on there and I suddenly saw what would go in that space instead.

.........see next picture......

The yellow, which had started to look like a giant, bound heart to me burst into flame at the top of the tree in the exact spot  where the hidden sphere would be. That seemed perfect to me, so there I stopped.                                                                      

Until tonight when I got the courage to try to put the diagram on top, using interference paint. In "person" I can hardly see the diagram, but the camera sees it almost too well. I fiddled with the settings to try to get it to look the way I saw it, but the various ways the camera saw this painting are kind of interesting in their own way. Here's the closest to the way I see it first

I had to change the color setting on my camera from "vivid" to "normal" and it still doesn't look right, but at least it made the s'firot and pathways less visible than the other settings. They really don't show up that strongly to the naked eye. Now get a load of the various ways the camera saw the s'firot!

I'll leave you with this version that the camera saw. This interference paint sure does do strange things! 

Looks like a photograph of an aura, doesn't it? What unearthly light is reflected in this painting??? 

I'm not finished with this piece yet. Or maybe it's not finished with me.