When we look at each other, we see the outside - clothes laying on skin. Smiles and eyes give away some of what's going on inside, but largely everything past the skin is a mystery to us.
I paint your personality - abstract multi-media portraits to try to capture what it's like on our insides, the qualities that radiate from our mysterious emotional and soulful depths.
For example, this woman in the painting "She Sees" knows things. Her friends ask for insights. She knows when tragedy has struck the family before the phone call comes. She feels all the energy in the room, so she laughs easily and seeks out the softest souls to be with - and often leaves the party early if the energy is too much, because seeing and feeling it all is draining.
She is the classic wise woman, in her knowledge that goes beyond classrooms. She is also artist, creator, dancer, cook, counselor, strategist, warrior, protector.
She may have some synesthesia - a capacity for hot-wired senses, like to feel the temperature of colors, smell music, or taste sounds, and she occasionally forgets that you don't.
Alone in nature in daytime and dark is where she soaks up quiet understanding and grounds herself. She goes where she can match her heartbeat to the music of the spheres. She knows what planets are visible at any given time, what phase the moon is in, and the constellations in the night sky, but only because they're company - she doesn't bother with astrology (except for the comfort it gives like any good story-telling) and she filters scientific findings too, for usefulness to humans instead of purposes with jagged edges.
She feels herself and all of us as a living, breathing whole, extensions of the lush life on this pulsating rock hurtling through space, rotating around a burning gaseous star, in one galaxy among countless multitudes. Through practice based on reading, quiet barefoot time, and the lessons of elders, she can admire the teensiest spider inside the tiniest flower bud, and feel you beside her, be aware of the sufferings and kindnesses happening all over our globe, and feel the vastness of celestial activities in space, all at once.
And that perspective is her source of calm, of equanimity. It's why she weeps in grief at cruelty, and can still dance for joy at all of us being alive.
She has two lifelong lessons. One is to take care of herself first, even when others don't understand, when people just want her to have the social battery of "normal" people. The second is how and when to share her insights - because people don't actually always want to know the truth, so it can cause pain and disruption. Like any tool, taking care it doesn't become a weapon.
While this inner portrait I've painted appears young and colorful and funky and creative, this person's outsides - their skin suit - may actually look very different. Might be any gender, very old or young, might look conventionally "beautiful" or average or even unappealing to you. They may be wounded or have a disability of any kind. They could be your neighbor, your sister, the "weird" aunt you make fun of. Could be you.
One of the great human skills, I think, is for us to learn not to let the skin suit and outward appearance keep us from seeing a person's inside capacities. I'm certainly learning this, daily.
Who in your life is this person?
"She Sees", abstract multi-media artwork © Lisa Johnson Arts
available as original artwork, 7 1/4" x 10"
available as spiral notebook with printed artwork, 6" x 8"