Losing My Mind to Paint My Mind

As I said in the last post, I decided during a sleepless night of thinking about what to paint in 2026, to paint an abstraction of my mind being seeded with ideas.

By the time I arrived at the studio the next day, however, the idea seemed narcissistic, so I decided to paint another of my “seed” ideas: rain drops viewed above the clouds.

Pleased and thinking it was a slam dunk, I primed a panel, painted a blue background adding an off-white cloud formation.

“Ok, rain, Vicki.”

Rain?

“Yes, rain!”

I spent the next three hours trying to paint rain.

I assumed rain is grey. Quite naïve, I admit, but rain clouds are grey and regular clouds are white – so rain is grey. Right?

Wrong?

As my mind flashed on seeing rain from a plane window, I realized I hadn’t actually “seen” rain– because raindrops are transparent.

While it seems like a short route from the first sentence of this post to this one, it was long and painful one in the studio. My panties were in a twist because I wasn’t creative enough to paint rain. It shouldn’t be that hard.

While I accepted a raindrop is colorless, why is a rain cloud dark grey?

I drank my iced coffee and fumed. Then googled the whole mess.

First why clouds are grey: as layers of moisture mount, the clouds stack vertically and the increased thickness prevents sunlight from penetrating, thus making the clouds deep grey from below. Embarrassed, I hoped that if my life had depended upon it, I would have realized this on my own.

Ok – so light is blocked by colorless rain?  But why does the air appear grey when it’s misting outside? Google was right there to help: Rain droplets scatter light in all directions; This scattering effect is called Mie scattering — it happens when particles are about the same size as visible light wavelengths.

Scholastically shamed, the darkest cloud in the studio was me.

Brooding, I opened my bag of popcorn.

Eating, I remembered a passage I had read online a week or so before, and started to laugh. Once home I tried to find it amongst the dozens of pages I print daily.

Here it is:

“It reminds me of a friend who had a flat tire on a country road. After finding he had no jack, he began walking, hoping to find a nearby farmer who would help him. It was getting dark and the crickets were getting louder. As he walked the overgrown road, he began to throw the dice of worry in his mind: What if the farmer’s not home? What if he is and won’t let me use his jack? What if he won’t let me use his phone? What if he’s frightened of me? I never did anything to him! Why won’t he just let me use this phone?! By the time he knocked on the farmer’s door, my friend was so preoccupied with what could go wrong that when the friendly old man answered, my friend bellowed, “Well, you can keep your Goddamn jack!

Humored, I went back to the studio the next day, picked up the painting and drifted off to who knows where. Coming “back” a couple of hours later, I realized I had, indeed, started to paint my mind.

As the painting came together, my body and mind relaxed – and my breathing slowed.

I’m not kidding. For days I cradled the wood panel like a sleeping child. Time flew and before I realized it, I had, indeed, painted my mind being seeded with ideas (finished piece above).

At one point I thought, “this is surreal:” simply allowing myself to walk into the studio…ignore my mind…and stumble onto myself.

It is not my typical style of painting, i.e., I don’t normally paint in such detail nor do I use small brushes, but this puppy is smothered in miniature detail executed with tiny brushes.

The finished painting is actually a mandala

When finished, I realized the painting of my mind is actually a mandala — a visual meditation tool made of symbolic elements originally found in India and other Eastern traditions.

I have been involved in Buddhism and Hinduism since my 20’s.

And a young woman once gifted me a mandala from her trip to India, which hung on my wall for years.

Apparently, it was hanging somewhere deeper than that.

P.S. Three days after I finished this post I opened my email to: “Why is the sky blue?” article. Absolutely spooking and a very interesting article.
https://explainers.blog/posts/why-is-the-sky-blue/?ref=newsletter.weeklyfilet.com

AI didn’t write this post