Back to Oaxaca

My life as a painter began in Oaxaca. It began before I even started painting seriously. I had the calling there, and knew what I wanted to make. It took years of study and practice before I was able to start fulfilling my vision, and it is an ongoing process, as I expect it will be all my life. I haven't been thinking about painting much in last few years. Recently though, my second son started sleeping through the night, and I found my mind and will returning to it. I didn't actually sit down in the studio yet, but I was beginning to think about it again. Just at this time I had an opportunity to travel to Oaxaca on my first solo trip since I had children. My return to Oaxaca was a wonderful revisiting of what I love about that city. It is a hotbed of inspiration in so many ways, and it connects to me on a subconscious level. On the second of the few nights that I was there I had a powerful dream, in which I traveled across oceans and through other worlds, feverishly searching for and then finding something of great value that I had once forgotten I ever had. In my dream featured prominently a bat family, absolutely glowing in a fruitful tree, surrounded by flowers and scented with the perfume of the ages and that which remains untarnished by the mundane. For the rest of my trip bats featured prominently, I saw real bats in courtyards at dusk, bat statues, bat paintings staring down from the ceiling. A powerful message! In native American and Meso-American mythology that bat represents the shedding of old patterns and the entrance into new life, such as in the ritual death of the shaman. The appearance of bat can be a call to enter into transformation, to rise to a challenge, to become. I find that to be a little daunting as a message, but it certainly was loud and clear.  I hope my ritual death is not going to be too painful! But I'm definitely not going to say no. I feel very lucky have gotten such a powerful call back into my craft, and it was a pleasure meditating on bats and their unique bodies and abilities and ecological niche over the last several months while I worked on this painting, which is my first oil completed in about 4 and a half years.