Grounded (From Where the Light Shines)

Grounded (From Where the Light Shines), Acrylic, Prismacolor Ebony pencil, 24k gold leaf, Posca paint pen, 36 x 48" by Lea K. Tawd

She lays on the earth and it holds her gently.  She closes her eyes and softly rests her right hand on a lovely dimple on her leg just below her hip.  Nearly nude, she is vulnerable, but that is her strength.  She grounds her energy down into the rich soil that supports her, while at the same time she basks in the sun.  She is whole. She is loved. She is secure and quietly confident.  She is Known and she is Seen.

This piece, in a way, feels like the culmination of my decades-long series of women looking inside themselves to locate their power.  It is also a decades-long culmination of the internal work I have been doing to locate my own power and to accept myself fully and completely as I am, even as I am ever-changing. 

This work is ongoing.  I come to a point of feeling incredible and then I am met with something that takes me down and I have to work through it and come back again.  I learned to run and feel strong for the first time, and then I suddenly couldn't catch my breath--even when I was walking--and I had to stop.  My son became a teenager and was more independent so I could really focus on my art...and then I had another baby and had to shift my whole idea of who I was going to be at that time in my life.  My art career really started taking off...and then my husband died and once again I had to reconsider who I am with this new layer of grief over everything.  

This is how life is.  We are up, we are down.  We try to be in control in some ways but there are bigger forces at work.  Grounded represents those moments in which we can love ourselves radically.  Grounding into these moments allows us to move through the darker times with more compassion and grace for ourselves and those in our lives. We are Grounded and this is From Where the Light Shines (the painting's second title).