Effulgence

Effulgence, soft pastel, February 2025. Canonical home in the Handworks catalog on spiritb.com.

Inspired by the concept of divine mercy — both the famous painting and my own spiritual experiences. An afternoon's work. I sat with the paper and the colors arranged themselves. The bloom in the center is where the strokes overlap into something the eye reads as light — that's the title.

Do you see the butterflies? I didn't, when I made it. This is how my art tends to work — form seems to appear out of the formless.

Posted here because the making of it belongs to this side of the story. The hour I spent on it was an hour my attention was on the paper instead of on the targeting situation. The point of the session was complete by the time I put the pastels down. The catalog came later.

Every piece in the Handworks catalog is, by the same count, another such hour. That's what the catalog quietly records — the time the operation didn't get. See art therapy for the underlying practice and alchemy for what the accumulated work becomes.