inner art journal

I play with paints, moving my brush slowly, enjoying the arc my hand makes and the miraculous appearance of gold from nothingness.

adding yellow
clear wax
brightens
changing my mood
I smile with my brush

The medium is encaustic, a strange cross between paint and sculpture. I get lost in the process; melting wax, adding color, using a heat gun. When it cools, I scrape and scratch the surface with pottery tools. A fast geologic evolution with melted gullies and miniature ragged mountains comes into being.

what moves me
to the roundness of pears
stretching the bounds?
paint flows to sounds
heard by hand

As the image appears, it mingles with the sweet scent of beeswax that rises from my canvas. Am I falling or being born? I remember a painting that haunts me from across the ages.

Mu Ch’i’s persimmons
the shape of the infinite
this moment in time
at the tip of my brush
a single day

***

Leslie Ihde

published in Haibun Today, vol 6, number 2