On creative instincts
Sneak peek Friday: Vol. 2
“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
— Rumi
Hello there!
I hope you won’t mind that today’s Sneak peek Friday isn’t so much a glimpse of what’s to come, as it is a closer look back at one of the illustrations from this week’s installment of “Home is a Window Seat” — one I wanted to spend just a little more time with before we head off to a new destination next week.
One of the things I was most excited about doing in this essay series was creating a large, window-shaped illustration for each chapter, as a kind of visual motif to tie all the stories together.
As you’ll soon see, these illustrations all feature the view beyond each window, to give you the feeling that you’re looking out the window yourself — except for this week’s. I wanted to play with the composition a bit and frame my two good friends, Kim and Emily, as they looked down at London for the first time:
The other thing I wanted to try out with this illustration was painting it in gray-scale. That isn’t something I do too often, but as I worked on it at our dining room table last Sunday, Jose peered over my shoulder at one point and said, “That was a good decision to paint it in black and white.”
I told him I didn’t really know why I’d wanted to paint it that way, only that my gut had been telling me to do so. For some reason, I felt that the spirit or feeling of the moment would come across stronger in gray-scale — without any other colors to take away from the weight that our first glimpse of London held for me.
It felt like a good reminder for when that happens in life, too — for the moments when all we have to follow is our gut.
When we don’t necessarily have a clear reason for a particular decision, but still we know it’s the right one and everything just flows from there. And I wanted to share that with you today, just in case this finds you at a crossroads of your own.
Here’s to our creative instincts — and trusting they’ll lead the way,
Candace
My answer, as a teacher, to so many questions parents ask about how they should react to the various situations their preteen child is in - trust your gut. My advice to friends in just about any situation is the same and many times I have done things that, even in the moment, I acknowledged to myself I ‘normally’ would have done something different but for some reason I made an unusual (for me) decision because I trusted my gut. And never have I regretted these decisions. And maybe we all need to know ourselves better (Mathematician plus more Thales said over 2000yrs ago ‘Know Thyself’) and trust that self.
Thanks for promoting my thinking and reminding me that the ‘trust your gut’ motto is so powerful.
As beautiful as always. And "always" means "VERY BEAUTIFUL WORK".
But - is it fully greyscale? It may be a trick of the eye, but I can almost see some pale greens and blues in there. Fully monochrome?