Canadian artist: Paulette Grant
Turning inwards and pulling out thoughts not so easily conveyed to other people is a challenge. I think the risk of showing the real person you are can make one feel very vulnerable sometimes. When I try to express why I do what I do as an artist, it makes for an emotional journey but one that I feel is worth the effort. So many of us wear masks in this life and I like to think that if we were to meet on a personal level our eyes would see the person behind the mask and thereby make an honest connection .
I have a giving nature and was born with the drive to re create what I see on the outside as well as what is inside myself. I paint the scenes of life around me with the understanding that colorful words and vibrant renditions of light and shadows are only one of many different ways to express the music of the soul.
As music is a universal language, it plays on the heartstrings as a melody that pleases some and rubs as sandpaper does on another according to one’s taste in music.
I spill myself with brush or pen without judgment because over the years I have come to understand that this part of the creative me is unique to me. Painting and poetry fills a need in me to share myself on a deep level with someone else. I love to evoke an emotion in someone with a painting. In the last few years I’ve been adding poetry to them. I want people to know that they are not alone in their search for beauty or understanding. This need to express is what drives me in all aspects of my life and I suppose this is why I have not settled into any one subject in my paintings, illustrations or poems. I am self taught and have learned my skills through trials and errors. My creative endeavors are done without any motive other than releasing the joys or pain of keeping it all inside myself. These different creative ways determined throughout my life the levels of satisfaction I have gleaned in life from just being me. I was singing before I could talk or walk and drawing mermaids before I could write and pondering the universe before I knew what the moon really was.
There is a well inside me that fills up and demands to be emptied. It just rises and spills itself into whatever form it wants to come through. When the brush is not enough or the music I feel inside cannot be express in singing, another part of my creative self rises up to the challenge and I cry on paper in poetry. When any of my paintings or poems inspire someone I am touched very deeply.
Sometimes I think if I could write a perfect poem or paint the painting I was meant to paint I could stop and be done with it but it is never enough. It is a passion.
A creative one is driven to share with others the beauty that is seen within and around us when at times to all intent and purposes there seems to be none.
So this is the story of my soul. Why I am here. Why I paint and why I write and it is my great pleasure to have shared myself with you today in this way.
autumnredstudioart.com