The Questions That Germinated

Over the last two weeks, I have found myself returning again and again to the small paintings I created in my “Listening to the Soul” art journal. Each morning began with the prompt of the day. Before I touched paint, I spent a little time journaling first, allowing whatever was present to move onto the page without trying to shape it too quickly. Only then would I begin painting. When the image felt complete for that day, I would sit with it for a few moments and write an initial reflection about what I was seeing, noticing, and understanding at that time.

At first, I believed that was the completion of the process. Yet when I returned to the journal later, something else began to happen. A color I had barely noticed before suddenly held my attention, or a shape seemed to carry a different emotional tone than it had the first time I looked at it. Sometimes it was my own written reflection that shifted as I reread a sentence and realized there was another question underneath it that I had not been ready to ask yet.

What surprised me was that this did not happen only once. Some of the paintings continued opening themselves in layers each time I revisited them. One reflection seemed to nourish the next, creating the conditions for deeper questions to germinate over time. I began to realize that each return to the journal happened from a different place within me, not only temporally, but emotionally as well. The paintings themselves had not changed, yet something in me had shifted between one viewing and the next. What I was able to recognize also deepened.

The process gave my inner world time to embrace and integrate what I needed to hear before taking the next step. I think this is part of what makes reflective art practice feel so different from simply creating an image. The painting is not only an expression of a moment; it becomes part of an ongoing relationship. Sometimes the deeper meaning does not arrive while the paint is still wet. At times it asks us to return several times before we are able to hear what the image has been trying to say.

These journal paintings may look small, but they have become part of the larger body of Soul Transcendent Art because they show the process in its most intimate form: image, reflection, return, and recognition.

I think there are experiences in life that unfold this way as well. We move through them once while they are happening, and then again later through reflection. Meaning changes as we change. Questions that were once hidden begin to surface. Understanding ripens in its own time. Perhaps this is why certain images continue calling us back, not because they are unfinished, but because something within us is still becoming in relationship to what they revealed.

To explore the larger body of Soul Transcendent Art paintings, you are welcome to visit the gallery.