Ardis, 90 is doing a “friends” series. Here is one of her pictures. When I saw it, I told her that I thought I saw an elephant.
“It can be anything you want it to be,” she replied with a smile. Ardis paints out of her heart and does not judge what comes out on paper. It is about the fun of expression and the feeling of getting it all down on paper in a colorful picture.
“Painting is so other people can see what your thoughts are. I don’t think about what I am going to do… I just get quiet and the thoughts come out through the paint. It’s a surprise.”
Ardis quickly identified with me when we did art together. We found ourselves at a table painting, each one of us in our own little worlds. She is 90 years old and paints out of her soul. She is not concerned with her art being a little different….almost surreal. She is going for the “process”….the process of creating… creating in the moment….not even planning it all out….just letting her picture evolve.
She looked at me while I was painting and called me a “thwarted messer arounder” I asked her what she meant. She said, “You are living the creative life as an adult, the life that was thwarted in you as a child.” I said, “How did YOU know?”
She looked at me with penetrating eyes and said, “I don’t know how I knew that. I just do.”
Perhaps she was thwarted in some ways too, and she now has time and freedom to paint what she calls whimsical paintings. The one below started with a memory of when she and her best friend took their cats and dolls into the woods and had a picnic. What started out to be a tree turned into a rainbow. She added more “figurines” later.
