I don’t always know when I sit down to make a piece of art why I’m making it.
I’ve learned to let my intuition run with it and look for the meaning afterwards. I always find that my subconscious was unearthing meaning and making connections that my conscious mind was unaware of.
We all do this quite a lot, but we aren’t always comfortable trusting to intuition, which is another way of saying that we don’t always trust ourselves. I know this to be true because I’ve been battling low self-confidence my whole life and now I’m winning the battle!
That’s how I painted this out of thin air.
I sat down with my toddler to just play with some paint and all I knew was that I’d paint something these shapes and colors. I knew one shape was antlers, and another a crescent moon, so I painted them.
Then the antlers asked for an animal head and I gave them one. The triangle in the background was important, but I didn’t know why. I softened it and played with it and fell in love with the shifting light and shadow and color as it shined down behind the antelope.
And then…a problem.
What to do with the yellow reaching forms on either side of the antlers? What were they? I couldn’t decide. The idea of bare, branching trees kept coming to mind, but why? My conscious mind kept vetoing the idea as irrelevant.
But, my subconscious kept suggesting it, so finally, I gave in and started painting them.
I loved the painting!
It felt so right and I still didn’t know what those yellow forms were. They could be anything… trees, seaweed, coral, lichen, more antlers… In fact it seemed fitting that their interpretation could be left to the viewer.
About a week later, I realized why I made this painting.
I had done an Instagram post on the beauty of branching forms just a couple days after I started this painting.
Oh. Branching forms!
There really is a universal beauty to them. We are biologically rigged to be attracted to branching forms. It’s because our modern environments (homes, offices, stores, etc…) are so barren of these forms from our natural environments that we seek them out.
As we live lives now impoverished of branching forms, the worship of things that branch becomes an appropriate, meaningful past-time.
Maybe in the future, they’ll wonder why our society began worshipping nature elements like gods and, after a long time of studying us, they’ll realize we turned to the worship of branching forms and other aspects of nature because we had so foolishly removed ourselves from our natural environment that we had no choice.
I hope the people of the future do make those discoveries because it will mean that in the future, human society will have re-integrated itself with the rest of the natural world well enough that our primitive yearning for nature art will have become a mystery.
Until then, let’s keep bringing the beauty of branching into our homes through plants, through antlers and through nature art.
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