Inspiration is intention obeyed.
If the air is jam-full of sounds which we tune in with, why should it not also be full of feels and smells and things seen through the spirit, drawing particles from us to them and them to us like magnets?
I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.
Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.
Last night I dreamed that I came face to face with a picture I had done and forgotten, a forest done in simple movement, just forms of trees moving in space. That is the third time I have seen pictures in my dreams, a glint of what I am striving to attain.
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.
The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures...
Don’t take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it’s you yourself that have made sure of it till it’s yours absolutely by conviction. It’s stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you’ll fall into a hole.
Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul.
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.
Oh, I wonder if I will ever feel the burst of birth-joy, that knowing that the indescribable, joyous thing that has wooed and wond me has passed through my life and produced one atom of the great reality.
It’s all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it’s all the unformable things one wants to paint – essence.
The earth is soaked and soggy with rain. Everything is drinking its fill and the surplus gluts the drains. The sky is full of it and lies low over the earth, heavy and dense. Even the sea is wetter than usual!
Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.
There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth.
What a splendid time Woo must have had.
Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing – harmony of life.
I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why?
The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.