a simple red mark

I was convinced that I had followed the “right” path. I was reentering the painting, warming up by making small red marks in the red layers of the womb wall, then smaller strokes of blue in the waters around one of the children’s heads.

 I “got the idea” to bring more attention to those small marks, to not just let them brush on as they came off the brush, but to make the mark a MARK, really, in hindsight, like “a better mark, a more care-filled mark.” I felt connected while I was doing this but I was indeed doing it.

Then what? The question arose what to do next, where to take these marks….(now I know that is a caution flag of its own- where else would this question be answered but from my idea filled mind).
I looked up and saw the daisies growing against the blue sky, and thought of small white marks in the blue sky. But when I got there, I made clouds! I began carefully painting, la dee dah, sure that I was not fixing the loosely applied paint from days ago that made the daisies and sky blue……


Just about that time, Barbara came around for her second visit of the day…..

I am chuckling now, I really couldn’t hear her!  She said, right away…..as I told her about what I was doing, how I was “developing what was there” - gosh, even that is a caution signal for me, thinking I know and have something to tell - (now, I might venture to say that the truth is either I don’t know or I am painting)….. but I digress……

So she said, “I’d be suspicious.”

What I love about Barbara is that she doesn’t say, she is suspicious, she guides me to become suspicious. She is not being the devil’s advocate, she is an advocate for the truth. It’s her job.


I could feel and see the difference in the beginning of the painting, how the first child and then the second one, literally appeared off the end of my brush….to where I was then, painting the clouds in the blue sky above the daisies.

I have a habit for expansion, to make something, to “express my idea” - the larger figure was one of the many ideas that was forming -in my head, I might add - not on the paper.
I was convinced that what I had just painted was where I should be.
Yes, of course it was, and the painting was ready and waiting to take me to the real experience just around the corner; to the kind of experience which issues out of process painting, which is not painting the way I know it.

This benevolent and graceful process always shows me what I’m ready to see. Always awaiting is the surprising discovery of an invitation to what is true and beyond the container of everything I know.
As Barbara Kaufman says, “Barbara has a knowing, then it drops away, and when I drop away, the connectedness to the life force appears.”

So, Barbara aimed/invited me back into the red.

I moved a bit of red in very fine lines into the blue here and there, and noticed I didn’t like that. Red and blue, ugh! Then I was painting white lines in the heads of the children. I was really avoiding letting this red out of the container of the umbilical cord. I moved to painting red in the placenta, noticing wanting to re-experience a “connection moment” from a past painting. 

Then the sense of staying inside the lines really hit me, as well as my preference for “peace and quiet”. The babies were quietly resting in this blue field of peaceful waters, but the blood red lining of the womb, and the placenta were throbbing with LIFE!!

So, the pulse started to show up as one curved red mark, on the outer edges of the umbilical cord. And it continued and continued and continued and continued…..pulsing outward from the first mark. Yes, it overlapped here and there, the beautiful form of the purple embracing arms and peaceful children. But they remained both beautiful and peaceful as this pulse came into being through several sizes of brush.

All the while, I could feel my mind wanting to “do something with this mark,” trying to grab it. But it was enough, again and again, it was just enough. This mark - in and as itself - was carrying a sovereignty of its very own. I couldn’t do anything with it. It wouldn’t let me! It was more than enough. There was no way to make it better or to turn it into something interesting (my favorite pastime).

As the class session ended, my brush was returning to small and smaller red marks.
A simple red mark was voicing the pulse of my experience, of life itself, in paint.
I'm curious what will come next.