Lifelines Watercolor Painting – “Metaphor”

Part of the Lifelines Series 

– Line is the most basic element of design; most things in life can be simplified down to a single line: a vein on a leaf, the silhouette of a distant mountain range, the mapped route taken from one point to another. These pieces start with a single line and grow, representing the memory of the past and potential of the future. –

I made this piece with the intention of keeping it above my front door. 

In the Western Feng Shui Bagua map, the entryway to the house is the career sector. The color is black and the element is water. Enhancing the sectors of your home with their elements can help attract good energy to those sectors. Elements like water and metal, in the form of an oval mirror, wind chime, literal water features or imagery representing water help good energy flow into the house.  

I recently went to a breath workshop and the instructor used the metaphor of a river to guide what we should do when faced with obstacles: a river does not stop when it faces obstacles, it simply flows around. In the same way instead of getting frustrating and giving up when we are presented with a challenge, we can find creative ways to flow around it. 

In this painting the water starts from the bottom and flows in every direction, from the front door into the whole house!

My painting process presented a challenge for this piece. Often I make trails of water for the watercolor pigment to follow and tilt the surface to direct the flow. I stepped back to look at the painting and was ready to call it Done. I accidentally left it propped up vertical while it was still wet. Gravity grabbed a big black drop of pigment and dragged it across my painting in the totally wrong direction.

I was so disgusted I couldn’t look at the painting for days. How is this painting supposed to attract good energy when I have bad feelings about it? Finally, I decided to sit with it and see what I could do. Watercolor is not a forgiving medium when it comes to mistakes. I ended up playing with some new techniques like wet-on-dry and was able to work the area enough that I could be content with it. I ended up introducing a lot more dark areas to balance everything out. This challenge added even more to the original inspiration behind the piece.

So the lessons here?

• Just keep flowing.
• Perfect does not exist.
• There is always darkness where there is light, find balance.