Where does a painting begin?

I'm grateful today that I wasn't able to pursue art as a career in my teens. The pressure to perform would probably have broken my love of making art. Instead, the PTP led to a lucrative career that enabled early retirement for motherhood and self-employment, so that now, painting can truly be my first love and I can pick up my brush without any expectations.

Painting creation is such a privilege. It inspires me to consider the millennia that led to my moment of lived experience at one perfect sunset in a remote fiord in the South Island of New Zealand. Or the magic of watching dolphins play in Tasman Bay. Or waves breaking on a pristine shore.

That leads inevitably to consider the primary energetic force behind it all. Is it pure love which made it all; which spoke it into being? This seems to be what happens every time I make a painting. Is that too big a claim? That where there was nothing, there suddenly is something? From an inspiration, using materials that are available, I create something. It's a little copy of what Genesis tells us God did at the beginning. Only God created the materials as well... Light... Dark... Sea... Land...

New Zealand is a country of physical diversity beyond any other, certainly for its size. It may be the first in the world to see the light of each new day, but it was genuinely the last land discovered on the planet and remains untouched by virtue of its distance from any neighbours (no, Australia is 1,200 miles away). That, and its youth, a tiny population and BIG geological miracles. We have geysers, hot springs and mud pools beside active and dormant volcanoes. Our vast lakes and virtually unexplored fiords enjoy heavy rainfall whose refraction over sea water allows marine life such as black coral to thrive a few metres below the surface rather than hundreds of metres down as found elsewhere in the world. Ski the 12th highest mountain in the world in the morning and swim in the sea in the afternoon.

This isn't a travel blog though. It's a bit of a rant because I am totally overwhelmed by my own country during a tour of these wonders. "Will you paint it?" people ask. How would I begin?

In the beginning, there was a blank canvas and a person hovering over it with an idea of beauty... I ask myself: "How can I match the spark of my response to the Creator's work?" Where do I find the faith to fling a potful of teal blue ink at the gesso and see waves emerge out of those spatters? Can I suspend pigment in cold wax to provide that sense of there-but-not-there? How much do I add exactly? When I gild and murder the simplicity, shall I use sandpaper to scrape it back, or my Bosch multi-tool to really remove some layers? Can I reproduce the resulting accidental beauty whenever I want, more deliberately?

I work at my craft, feeling rather than thinking, questioning rather than knowing. I am blind until I see. I trust Someone I cannot see, but who I believe sees me. Someone who I believe delights in me.

It's not a bad place to start...

In art, or in prayer...

(Of course, you will by now have spotted Who my first love really is.)

Early dawn aboard the Milford Wanderer in Doubtful Sound, Fiordland, New Zealand