Ideas emerge

Ok, so India, northern India, specifically Delhi, is a lot to take in. Speaking for myself, my soft American psyche was a little overwhelmed by, well, everything! The crowds, the smoky air, the language gap, the amount of sensory input, the food, the traffic, and the incredible beauty of so much that I saw as well. Truly, I saw cows, monkeys, pigs, and stray dogs grazing for food among the trash in the traffic intersections. How do you even wrap your head around that one?

But I came here in part to make some art, and I needed a focus. At the Sanskriti museum, there happened to be a wonderful exhibition of shadow puppets, painted on stretched and cured goatskins. I was immediately drawn to them because of their shapes. The puppets depict Hindu gods and goddesses, animals, and what all, very fancifully painted and often quite large. That was it. That worked with my interest in shape. And then it all came together for me.

Here are some of the puppets.

 

And then I realized that the spilled paint pieces I'd been struggling with back home related very well to these images. They too were all about shape and color.

So I took out the Mylar sheets I brought with me and spilled some of the High Flow acrylics onto them.

After they dried, I cut the shapes out and mounted them on paper. But it took me another couple of days to take the next step. A week later, something good happened!