I can't stop smiling.

Last night something incredible happened. Well, more than incredible, amazing. I can't stop smiling. Where do I begin?

A while back, and I think I blogged about that too, my friend asked me to paint something and get out of my comfort zone for it. Anyone who has seen my paintings knows that I opt for florals and abstracts and rarely, if ever, stray from that. I use color in awesome ways but don't stray from style, usually.

I've always been enamored with space. I've always read about nebula, galaxies, the stars, the planets, and aliens. It's always been something that's with me. I've had some experiences that don't belong in this post, but let's just say - I know we aren't the only accident of sentient life in the universe.

So, I started painting nebulas. Using intense colors and making images of gas clouds and stars and skies and lands - nothing you'd see on Earth really - just color washes, what sunsets might look like in another atmosphere, skyscapes. This was not the part that got out of my comfort zone. For a couple weeks, I've had this color wash nebula backgrounds hung in various places in my house so that I could stare at them and understand the direction I need to take them artistically.

Last night, I took one down off the wall and understood that there needed to be a person looking out from inside the gas clouds. And I drew and painted him on the canvas. The thing is, I want to weep for how beautiful he turned out. I literally stared into his face for 45 minutes with the biggest smile I've ever had. And then - I took a blank canvas and made a woman.
She's equally beautiful, though completely different than the man. Thing is, the man emerged from the painting. The woman, she emerged from nothing. I'm still completely floored by how the whole thing went down because both paintings were done in less than an hour a piece.

I woke up smiling and can't get the smile off of my face today - not that I want to. I woke up feeling enlightened and energized and just beyond words. The me I set out to find, I found - with the swoop of a paintbrush and the sound of KT Tunstall playing in the living room. I was in a zone last night and from that zone I reemerged like a butterfly from her cocoon.

Today is an amazing day. If I could only stop staring at my paintings.