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Stained Glass Life

© Regina Sewell

Sometimes painting for me is like dreaming. Last week I rolled art paper out on the kitchen floor, dug out my acrylics, and painted, with some “help” from my cats, the contents of my mind. The final picture looks sort of like a large stained glass window gone awry. Thick black paint outlines odd shaped “panes.” The black outlines that dominate the left side of the painting steadily get thinner and less oppressive as they progress to the right. The panes themselves also change in character and shape from one side of the painting to the other. On the left side, the panes are either red, yellow or orange, with one white pane crushed between. Some of the panes on the left side have white or black squiggles running through them. Others have black lines that look like barbed wire cutting across them. A big orange oval swirls with black and yellow waves at about the center of the page. The panes get larger and change character as the painting sweeps to the right. Solid colors give way to multi-colored designs. Red and orange give way to blue and white, with red, orange and yellow thrown in for highlights. The panes on the left side of the page are filled with things that make me smile: a footprint, an abstract guitar, broken glasses, a dancing book, in addition to dots, feathers, hearts and squiggles.

When I dream, I don’t intend to create eccentric characters and non-linear plots; my dreams just turn out that way. Likewise, I didn’t intend to paint something akin to a stained glass window. I was just trying to work through the angst that seemed to have taken over my soul. I thought if I could get it out on paper I could get it out of me. It didn’t work that way, but at least it created a space for my unconscious mind to speak to my conscious self. The result was that my unconscious mind created a visual way to explain the problem to my conscious, rational mind.

Looking at the painting as if I were interpreting a dream, the metaphors seem clear. The left side of the painting represents what was at the time, my reality. The right side represents my dreams for the future. The black outlines represent the dominating rules, the do’s, don’ts, musts, oughts, and shoulds that scream through in my head through all of my waking hours and even into my dreams. The voices, well captured by the thick black paint, feel like a huge, wet wool blanket draping over my head, shoulders, and back. Not only are these voices all critical, they all demand that I do everything at once, and do it all perfectly.

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