So it’s been a long time since I have done any art by painting. My brother however, has a new home and the walls are bare. His son Jordan’s room begs for color. Edward and Mindy have asked if I would be willing to assist with a mural. For the last two weeks the ideas and creative momentum have building.
For a while however, working my current creative mediums of words and programing, it seemed like I wasn’t feeling up for it. After all, I am full out focused on many other projects and intentions and it’s been almost six years since I painted last.
However, as I pondered the possibility of a mural for my nephew Jordan’s room, the rooms of my own childhood came back to me. My room had been pretty plain, but our home bathroom had these endlessly intriguing coloured tiles. The small square tiles had been laid by hand in a rather random– yet hand laid in an abstract pattern. As a kid I spent years staring at those tiles, playing games in my head with the colors, with the spaces, imagining sailing one to the other. It was, in retrospect, an uncannily edifying incidental art experience that helped nurture my imagination and spacial skills. And who knows what else!
Now, that was just some tiles laid down by a carpenter with latent cubist inclinations. However, Imagine, if a child had a purposely crafted wall, for the express purpose of visual play, color and spatial inspiration. Wow– the potential of something with the full intention of nurturing d inspiring imagination! Kids get lots of multimedia visual stimulation these days, but there’s truly something unique in static visuals that one spends years, or even decades around, that one grows with, the relationship maturing with the one who is ever interpreting it.
And so it is decided! The artistic juices are flowing! I’ve set out to make my nephew Jordan and his family a mural!
I am eschewing technical perfection in favor of playful symbolism. As the mural is evolving symbols are a way to lay the seeds of countless stories and possibilities– especially family symbols and icons conecting to personal connections.
I suppose it’s a little bit like building a playground for his imagination……
