The Blue of Distance: Young girl dancing as only the goddess can dance

I’d love to know how this painting makes you feel.

I’ve been dreaming about this image for awhile, inspired by an old photograph I found in my grandmother’s box of family ephemera. I don’t know who the girl is, or what she is doing. But she seems to be doing something, a thing at which I want her to succeed. I feel a purpose and a power in this image, a story that’s common to many women, although right now I can’t give that story a beginning, middle, or end.

On my desk is a stack of photos that I’ve selected from that old cardboard box. I don’t know any of the people in the photos. Even if their names are scrawled on the back of the photo, I still have no stories to go with the images.

Last month with my online book club I read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It’s funny how a book can kindle a desire to create something that can grow alongside the words of the original author. It grew in my brain to paint these photos, using blue as the primary color, the blue, as Solnit says, of distance.

A fitting quote from the book: “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost.”

For this painting, I used the old pages from my vintage copy of A Little Princess, and I love how the words come through on the girl’s arms and legs. These are pages from the chapter where Sarah learns her father died and she is reduced to poverty. I remember sobbing and sobbing when I read this as a child. The idea of losing my own dear daddy was too much for me. But of course Sarah handles this setback with grave aplomb, as do all plucky heroines. I am thinking on making this small painting something larger. Sometimes when you put an idea out there, it uses up all its energy.

I will have to see if this wants to be larger. I think it does. I think there’s a message somewhere in this. If paint is the message in the bottle, then the bottle is blue, corked with time, and floating in a sea of imagination.