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Remarkable: To be worthy of remark. That's my definition.

According to Merriam-Webster: worthy of being or likely to be noticed especially as being uncommon or extraordinary.

I'm reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin and he talks about doing or making something remarkable and being different from the ordinary. The ordinary is when something no longer stands out and gets noticed. It has become, if it once was remarkable, the norm.

I gave this a lot of thought and flipped through my mental rolodex of all the artists I know (of) and whom I believe to be remarkable. The list is long and at the same time, I noticed that every single one of these persons is more remarkable than what they do or make.

It's not only the 'thing' that is remarkable, it's the person that is remarkable. A remarkable person is not able to do something that isn't remarkable when they give it everything they have. They are the kind of people who take risks, face their fears, study study study, fail and try again. They seem to be relentless, tireless people with an endless stream of imagination, innovation and ideas.

I don't know if this remarkabledness is available or within all of us, and some of us are exceptional at some things we do, but overall we're ordinary compared to these people. There's nothing wrong with being ordinary, but if you're unhappy because you believe you are remarkable and no one has taken notice, then maybe you need to tap into that remarkabledness, take a big big leap and commit to living up to your remarkability.

Go for it! You are remarkable!

When I read The Music Lesson - A Spiritual Search For Growth Through Music, by Victor Wooten, I saw parallels between music, painting and life. He writes: "We think that Music stops at the ears. That is a mistake. Vibrations can be felt in all paces and at all times, even with the eyes." 

In his book Victor reminds us Life is our teacher. To learn from her we must listen. We must listen very carefully to the 'Music' and to hear the music we listen to the notes, to the pitch, the vibration, the duration, and most of all to listen or feel the groove before even playing a single note. We do this by listening to our gut, reading the room, assessing the music before making a decision, before speaking, before reacting or acting, before assuming and judging, before doing what we do out of habit. We pause, listen, feel, wait and listen some more.

To find the groove in painting I look at the canvas, listen and wait. If I jump in too soon or without knowing why I'm doing this thing, everything goes sideways. I listen, pause, listen some more, feel, and wait. When I start to paint I'm in the groove and everything seems to fall into place.

Victor's mentor tells him he is a bass player because he plays bass, but that he himself (the mentor) is a musician and plays music. I label myself a painter yet in Victor's parlance I would be an artist who creates. When I paint, I mix colours and make marks on a surface, these are the notes. The canvas, brush, paint and so on are the tools or instruments for making the painting. The way the marks are made is the groove. The painting is the music. The sculpture is the music. The costume is the music. My medium and subject matters not, I am an artist.

No matter what I engage in, I endeavour to listen to the groove with all my attention, with an open heart, to listen to all the sounds and to learn from the music.

Thank you for listening and grooving with me.

Hugs,

Elsa

PS (If someone is singing a song, rather than jumping ahead to the next verse, listen to the groove, and join them in harmony.)

Ponderings -- "Speech is Silver, Silence is Golden" a proverb commending the value of silence over speech, its origin is inexact.

At times in conversation, we think of something to share and we don't because there are no rests, or we've forgotten what we were thinking of saying, or we do and it's lost in the clamour. I've been thinking about this and I believe this happens possibly because we are not hearing the groove. What are we listening to or for? When we listen with our whole being we hear and learn something new. When that happens, the experience alone is wonderful. We don't need to say what we thought we had to say because it's no longer pertinent. The conversation moves along and we contribute only if we have something valuable to add. This is grooving in conversation. Go with the flow. If the conversation is not interesting to us, it's food for thought and we can ponder why we decided it's not interesting or we can just listen the sounds of the words, the roll of the r's, the punctuation, the rhythm, the loudness and softness, the pace. We can learn to like the conversation, in the same way we can learn to appreciate a piece of music. We don't need to play the music to enjoy it. 

I always swim with my eyes open so I can see the colours of the sea, the creatures swimming by, the swaying sea grasses, hoping for the watchful seal to swim beneath me and wishing the snout of a big orca will suddenly appear. I swim alone in crashing waves and blowing wind. I swim alone at night my nude body sparkling with bioluminescence.

You may tell me you're afraid of swimming in the ocean and you'd never swim alone, especially not at night. You tell me you think I'm brave. When I enter the water, I trust everything is fine and will be. I take a deep breath and consciously relax all my muscles and float like a jellyfish. The cold water no longer feels cold. I meet with it and stay for as long as I want. I become the sea.

I walk at night, alone in the woods. Guided only by the openess beneath my feet and the midnight blue through the silhouette of the trees, I sense the surroundings. You may tell me you wouldn't feel safe, I tell you it only feels spooky if you believe your mind. When I follow my heart and trust, it's magical and my mind relaxes. I listen to the songs of the night as owls and critters harmonize along with the rhythm of my heart. You may want to try this sometime and become the forest.

I face a blank canvas on the easel. On my palette next to it, I've squeezed out transparent yellow, oxide, alizarin, blue, brown and opaque white. Transparent because I can see the light through them. Have you ever noticed the light glowing through papery petals, or the fleeting turquoise of a cresting wave, or the shimmer on a pearl? It's like that. I mix piles of colours with a liquid galkyd to thin this transparent paint further and roll it all out on the carefully oil primed surface. This surface won't stain and I can wipe away colour to reveal the bright of the canvas. I mix fresh colour with cold wax and it looks and feels like velvet. Do you know this feeling? After every application, I look back at a mirror returning the image in reverse and it reveals it's desires to me. A line here, break it up. A dab there, press harder. Skip the brush along this texture and watch what happens. I gasp in awe and vibrate with delight. I don't know where we are going. I like it this way. I become my paintings.

When I look back on my life, believing I needed to arrive at a determined destination and never did, I now see there is no such thing for me. In fluid transformation, I am becoming and I hope I shall not arrive. I'm not courageous or brave, I'm not afraid. I try things. I fail. I become somewhere new. How about you? 

Until next time, I hope you can indulge in some quietude in a dark corner of your yard and listen to your courage.

Flûte - I went to the market to find a flute that had the perfect pitch to tootle over the sea and attract whales. The flute maker offered one with the same pitch that he had played for orcas, so I bought it.   

I have not played my flute to the whales as I have not achieved a quality in making sounds I think would attract them, so I made this painting instead. As I was figuring out a decent composition, I envisioned the woman sitting in the boat and that was not working so I walked away and let go of the idea of painting this.  And out of nowhere the idea came to paint the woman standing, in the boat on calm water, at night. That's just how it was supposed to happen.

The woman is playing her flute making tootling sounds and a humpback has come by to sing along.

Companions - I could not read English until I was about 26. I failed English in high school and still graduated for some reason. To this day, I cannot understand newspaper articles or news headers, which is fine as I'm not interested anyways. The first book I could understand which launched my appetite for reading was 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury.

I painted the reader backlit as she glows and revels in the beauty of the prose marvelling her into a world of imagination. Her lap companion is obscure and can be anyone or anything you wish.

Walking In The Rain - Two women walking under a single umbrella. I initially called this painting Rainbrella as they are shielding from rain and not from the sun which would be creating an umbra (Latin for shadow). If that's what it's doing, it really ought to be called a sunbrella or a breaksun. English is a very interestingly difficult language to understand. I'm going to stick with Rainbrella as the official title of this painting. In French we use Para (Spanish for for) pluie (French for rain). In Spanish it's even more confusing. Paraguas. To me it could break out into Par (which is really 'pair' in Spanish but I'm going to say it wants to mean 'for, unless it's Latin) aguas (Spanish for waters). Notice the plural which is more than one, so it must then mean many rain drops. 'For Raindrops' is paraguas! 

If you forget your ForRainDrops then you will surely get wet walking in the rain.

Here is the KEY to the Stories Gallery.