“Fault Line with Parrot” by Diane Lucille Meyer
In the very old green sketchbook, I found a watercolor sketch of a parrot. He was a borrowed pet very noisy and very active, almost more so when he saw me attempting to paint him. I retrace my random brush strokes back to the time and place when I made this sketch and I feel his effervescence and energy as I study the piece, closely and from afar, yet when I turn the sketch slightly on to its side, I see the window drenched with rain and the blurred edges of the landscape beyond.
It was 1987 when I painted this parrot. My studio, a crude room added on to my son’s bedroom was my only real option for a workspace with a young child to raise. My father had just died and I was painting through my grief. The movements in the paintings of that time were weeping movements and gestures of despair. The confines of the rules of the paintings felt secure, yet so like my father and his limitations. There was a conversation going on between him and me as the water passed into the paper.
I know what the bird gave me as I followed his hops and flutters and stretching of feathers. I saw flight and freedom in every small fiber of the tiniest feather and an awareness in his eyes that was not of my world. I just gestured with the paint and water as I followed him and stayed with his being. The finished sketch looked wild to me and a bit raw. I laid down my brush that day having made a small yet profound departure from my walled-in attempts at beauty through realism. This was beauty through expression and connection.
The bird gave me a good lesson in flight. He met me at the broken bridge and showed me how to lift myself over. He knew another way and I trusted him to tell me. Not with words or thoughts but by our connections to spirit. He lured me in and held me in that wonderful freedom, that splashing, soaring, playful, wall-less space.
Time speaks in my painting and tells me to follow one movement with another, one color with another. Time tells me to stay with the passage until it’s resolved; time rewards me with a glimpse of the divine when things begin to harmonize. Time composes the space of love and the image of the faces in my memories. Considering time as moments connected to moments I understand the passing, as if Time-then knows Time-now. There are embedded messages in every present moment that will speak later.
Time holds the water in the belly of my brush; time is the puddle on the surface of my paper that asks for permission to be absorbed. Time lets the water linger while drying, and there are paintings where time corrects my mistakes, rearranges the flowers in the vase, and brightens the reflections when I have long left the studio.
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Diane Lucille Meyer Artist Statement:
Diane has been a professional artist and fine art educator since 1975. She received her doctorate in psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology with a
specialization in Creative Expression. Her dissertation research focused on transformation through the creative process.
Diane brings experience as a facilitator in creative and conscious aging and is focusing her current research on creativity and wellness. Her watercolor paintings
are exhibited nationally and housed in over 25 distinguished corporate and museum collections.
Diane’s publications include: The lost dialogue of artists: negotiating the conjuring of art (International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, Vol. 34(1-2), 2015), Connecting to the sacred through contemplative gaze (International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Vol. 34(1-2), 2015), her dissertation: Reaching into shadow: An exploration of transcendence through artistic crisis, and Interpreting Along the Deckled Edge: The Artist’s Place in Leadership (Integral Leadership Review, October, 2012).
