Air to Water: The Revolution of Ten Koi

    Air to Water:

​    Initially these three canvases pictured below started out as a composition of a flock of birds. Then gradually the flock turned into a combination of birds and fish, until in the end all the painted birds became fish to me. And as my initial idea of bringing lightness to creatures in flight transformed, I saw the forms as if they were floating on the surface of something deeper, something that had a parallel plane below…  and then all my painted skies of swirling clouds, stars, and galaxies turned into interconnected waves of flowing streams, lily pads, and lotus flowers.
 
    When I started this painting, I wasn’t familiar with Koi fish at all really.  I discovered Koi fish after doing some research of different kinds of fish and, based on appearance, I saw them as the type that most resembled the figures of my transformed painted birds.  As my painting evolved however, I became more curious with Koi fish having identified them as the subject in my painting; and I did a little more research about their nature and cultural symbolism. Consequentially, I found it interesting to reflect upon the revelation that, due to their ability to swim upstream, Koi fish have symbolically come to simultaneously represent both good fortune as well as endurance of adversity - - two seemingly contrary conditions or characteristics that I would not have known were attributed to a creature that appears so simply graceful in the water.
 
I call this series of three paintings on 36"x 24" canvases “The Revolution of Ten Koi ( in 3 pts.)”

Some process pictures of the painted birds transforming to painted fish:

   Pulling all three of these canvases together took a lot of energy to paint and many elements surfaced that required attention to detail while keeping a continued eye on the big collective picture to keep it all in a balanced flow.  Two times I thought I was completely finished with the collection only to find myself back at the easel for more ‘rounds’ of unfolding layers. ( For example, in the beginning there was no big collective wave rounding out the left canvas and breaking in the center canvas. That was something that came with more time and a lot more brushstrokes. )  

​   It’s hard to know when a painting is finished, when to turn the tide to face a future point when I make my time spent on these canvases a thing of the past.  Someone once asked me a question that I could contemplate forever ( …far longer than thoughts about chickens, and eggs, and trees, or falls in the forest even.)  The question was, “How does an artist know when a painting is finished?”  For such relevant points of reflection, I will refer to The Master, Leonardo DaVinci, who would say: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”  Heaven knows the truth in that.  On this note I will share some art pieces that I looked to for inspiration or reflection or simply to use as a reference for my brush strokes in “The Revolution of Ten Koi ( in 3 pts.)” Some are abandoned pieces and others are discoveries that to me were new once again.  All the paintings are relatively old.


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     The photo below is a picture of some shelves in my new home studio which I am loving… the work space is like a childhood dream come true.  One of the large canvases with big flowers was a piece that I was working on back in the early part of the fall of 2016 intended for a wall in our brand new home that I never got around to finishing. This winter I got back to the project and recycled my efforts by completely starting over with these new canvases which eventually became these transformed birds in flight I call Koi fish.

    The first time I started painting some canvases with big, colorful, blooming flowers for the wall, but the project was abandoned as life got busy with plans for the season, too many distractions calling my attention to some unbelievable and triggering "locker room news" and other unbelievable news in my country’s current affairs; and my flow and inspiration for it was lost. I kept one of those canvases up on my shelf seeing the brush strokes and pallet as inspiration for another time.

 

     
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     This next  particular painting is an old, never really finished, pretty scratched-up canvas that was thrown in a big box that got stored away in my art room closet and fell off a closet shelf when I was in there shuffling around for some supplies to start this project of what I was thinking was going to turn out to be birds in flight. I guess you could say that, both personally and universally, I believe in the coincidence of synchronicity, or that I like to keep with the beat of serendipity, or that I sense life as flowing in currents of hidden interconnected patterns - - so I saw its random rediscovery as curious and decided to put it on a shelf and think about it.

​       I remember doing the painting many, many years ago when I was a young woman at college just for the sake of making an effort to decompress during a time when I was finding the world around me overwhelmingly and inescapably stressful ( and hurtful ) even as I continued to try to create some hopefulness despite despairing situations. In multiple ways, it got shockingly cold where I went away to college in the north but even still, looking back, having been buttoned-up from head to toe didn't turn out to be a bad thing.         I found the female figure in a magazine and decided to paint part of her because I liked her big sun hat. The rest of the canvas beyond that I just filled in with some kind of background.

​      I never really did much at all with my paintings or drawings back in the years I was a student since art wasn’t something I studied in school but just more-or-less something that I did on my own only occasionally if and when I could find the time and space; so I’m pretty sure this canvas probably got stashed away shortly after painting it. This time throughout my fish painting process, I kept it on my work area shelf and looked at it taking note of the work I was doing there while currently feeling the forces of swirling currents and the same flow in the brushstrokes of the Koi painting.

 Some of the ongoing numbered canvases in my series “Is It Bigger Than A Breadbox? ~ ‘TV Land’, ‘Saturn’, ‘December’, and ‘Parrot Wallpaper’ ’’ also have reflections about the processing of my collage experience in the 1980’s. { At this point of this blog update I am at #12. }

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Also, some other artwork of mine created during my time away at collage is reviewed in the blog: 
​“Spirits of Irish Immigrants”

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A review of some artwork from 8 years of my blogs (2016 - 2024) pieced together in late summer of 2024 includes this painting in a collection of pieces:
“Hats On for Our Grandmothers, For Our Suffrage Era Ancestors, and For Ancient Columns of the Ionic Order”

   

​    This next piece is just some painted sketch work that has been floating around my studio space since this past summer.  It’s a scratch 12 x 12 canvas board that I was playing with in anticipation for *The Great American Total Solar Eclipse of 2017*; and like the other canvases mentioned, I found myself looking to some of its forms and strokes and patterns when painting “The Revolution of Ten Koi”.  

   
    The last couple pieces of artwork that called my attention during the process of my eventually completed 3-part canvas collection I am going to share simply because I found the timeliness of their discovery and rediscovery more than inspiring. - - Both of the pieces below I happened to come across this winter at relatively the same time while scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed.

    The first piece is a painting by my Mom’s Mom’s Dad - - My Great-Grandfather William Purcell McDonald {1864-1931}. I saw the painting for the first time ever when I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed and discovered that it was shared as the cover photo for the Facebook page of The Art League of Cincinnati.  The painting is called “The Woods in Winter” and upon further exploration discovered that it was also accompanied with a profile of my Great-Grandfather and some more of his famous artwork.  ( Read more about some of my Great-Grandfather’s artwork, and mine, on my “Sentimental Reminder: Seeds of Suns” blog here. ) 

 
    Coincidently, just minutes after discovering my Great-Grandfather’s winter woods painting on the Art League’s Facebook page, my Facebook *Time-Hop* app notified me that I shared my winter woods painting below the same day four years prior. I called the painting ‘Winter’s Peace’ using the figure of a young girl to reflect on the quiet introspection that art and these months of the year can bring. As serendipity would have it, it was also just about the same time of these Facebook share discoveries that I was finding myself going back for my third ‘round’ with my Koi fish painting where I was in the process of reflecting on the spiraling energy in the painting as bringing interpreted rays of unfolding light from the lotus flowers to represent another elemental layer of that work.

     
​     Being 'self-taught', I have often thought to myself that my art, like my heart (which can sometimes find inspiration from ancestors like my artist great-grandfather)  precedes me... The most meaningful thing to do is to trust it and follow it. It knows more than me. I guess in this way then, to me it makes sense that in the end this painting process revealed itself to be a stream.

     The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. 

​~ Shams Tabrizi 
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​Find more blog reflections about the form of a *spiral* shape in:

“The Timeless Charlie Hustle and The Geometry Of A Rose”

and

"Hats On for Our Grandmothers, for Our Suffrage Era Ancestors, and for Ancient Columns of the Ionic Order"

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