The Goal is Joy — Judy Aveiro

“The basis of your life is absolute freedom, the goal is joy, and the result of that perfect combination is motion forward, or growth. Your goal is to find objects of attention that let your cork raise.” Esther Hicks

Esther paints this picture: You are a cork happily bobbing on the water’s surface. Any negative thought or habit you hold on to pulls you under. Relief is simply doing your best to reach for a better-feeling thought (even anger). When you do, you immediately pop back up to the surface. Yeah, there’s a learning curve (and one that I’ve had to repeat countless times in a single minute). The results are so worth any effort.

This is the original Om design that inspired me to create my own.

Choosing “Wonder” as my word of the year has led to some really fun ideas and many satisfying moments. (If you missed where this all started, you can go to my website judyaveiro.com and scroll back to the January newsletter.) To that end, here are some of those ideas:

My take on the thousand-petaled lotus blossom. Bounce #1.

Bounce #2 was interpreting my Om design to reflect my perceptions of my sister and brother. My artist friend Patrice wanted to see Jean’s on a larger scale so I decided to place it close to Max’s so you can see how different the results using the same design. (In art as in life, intention is everything.)

The Om idea led to re-visiting stencil cut-outs employing my own designs, hand-painted papers and a mat knife. This next series shows how I played with all of that.

Bounce #3: Here you see my hand-painted paper, the Om design, and the already-painted watercolor paper behind them. (Originally, the hand-painted paper was a way for me to use leftover paint and to play with my stencils with no other thought in mind.)

The Om is partially cut out. You see the mat knife I’m using. And I’ve begun to place the cut-outs on the painted paper.

I started playing with the cut-outs and… yikes! Now I have a rabbit-eared Amish quilt so…

…back to the original design. I skewed the thousand-petaled lotus blossom tips so they don’t quite point North-South. It’s a small detail that can be easily overlooked but (to me) adds visual interest. A gust of wind blew all my pieces off the table inspiring me to reset them not in their original placement (again, subtly adding visual interest). Here you see the start of my background wash. I wanted this to be soft-edged, kinda mystical, as if the Om’s promise was emerging for the viewer.

The end result and I loved, loved, loved creating this painting. The contrasting colors, the fade to dark background - so much pleases me about this piece.

Bounce #4 was inspired by the leftovers - another Om using the same stencil cut-outs. So far, the background papers have been painted and the design has been cut out. Next I will play with layout options.

Here are just two of the many layout placements I played with. Yeah, I could use a computer app to do this but I enjoy hands-on manipulation - it makes me happy and I don’t mind the time it takes at all.

A simple definition of the Sanskrit word Om is “everyone and everything” which became the title of this painting. Here’s the end design. I really enjoyed the whole process. Exploration, expansion, such satisfying ways to spend ones time.

Ideas become springboards and if I don’t fret too much about where I think I should be headed, I find some very, very, very satisfying moments along the way.

Stay tuned, gang, I have so much more to share…

Sending you joy (and freedom and growth, off course),