Acts of Faith

I spent yesterday afternoon enlarging Bailey picture in order to put her on my easel. I will look at her for a week or so then take her down and do a painting on either canvas or wood. I will trace the outline--it will be big 45 inches!!- and don't know yet about what else paint wise, some oil some encaustic(if i do encaustic, I have to prepare the ground with hide glue and whiting, six or seven coats of real gesso, sanded between each application, an act of devotion) some pallette knife. I will paint her while she is away for the month of July. I used to think it was somehow cheating to trace but if I continue to listen to those voices I will not get anything done.
The faith part comes in because it is hard for me to believe that I remember how to paint. This comes at the beginning of every painting that I do-a panicky feeling that I won't know how to proceed. I am reading the book that Ted Orland sent me called "Art and Fear', By Ted Orland and David Bayles. I am absorbing some of it. Am I dense or is there just so much in this book.Both! In the book, they talk about perfectionism, "To require perfection is to invite paralysis."and "To demand perfection is to deny your humanity, as though you would be better off without it. Yet this ordinary (and universal) humanity is the very source of your work..." I do battle with the disease of perfectionism.... and also the fear that if I am a painter then I am like my mother, who is lost and crazy, and a painter. These are not fears that scream at me, but they are like a small trickle in the backround. Just enough for me to consider doing other things instead. Things that make more noise than the trickle, I cook or eat or shop or read blog after blog after blog.
If I just show up in the right space, ready to do the work, the faith part will work. I play loud music, too, in my studio , to obliterate the trickle of doubt. Dar Williams, Joni Mitchell, Indigo Girls, James Taylor-I refuse to call them oldies. And I invite angels to sing along.

The Clematis is blooming in my yard. I planted it and it was three years before it had even one flower. They do not like to be moved I hear. It was defiantly barren. I nurtured, I built a wall around it, I weeded and gave it a trellis. Finally one year, one flower appeared. And every year since there have been more and more and now it is a beautiful thing to behold. And so -faith indeed.