Waiting for Red

In my sketchbook, and here using paper, and acrylics on a small canvas board, I am continuing to think about Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales. So many of the tales have woods and scary things trying to get children. I think about how ancient,and primal the wish to protect our children from the scary things in the woods and elsewhere is. It certainly speaks to my heart. Telling the tales, and painting pictures are both ways of letting them go, and trying to deal with our fears for them.

I have noticed most of my paintings for the past year tend to have a fearful element to them, even when I wasn't consciously thinking about them as scary. I am interested in what comes from ones unconscious mind, unbidden and often unwanted into ones work. I guess I'll quit giving Georgia O'Keeffe a posthumous hard time about denying her paintings were sexual in nature. You just never know.