Green without 'Green'

Elena's Greens

12" x 9"

pastel on Wallis paper

I taught a class last week on how to paint greens without using any actual green pastel sticks. Instead I layered a lot of turquoise, cobalt, cerulean and ultramarine blues with gold, yellow, yellow-ochre and pale orange to arrive at 'green' colors. In the course of the painting I used almost every other hue in my palette, except true green. This exercise helps illustrate the almost unlimited palette of colors you can derive from using what you have creatively.

Isn't that a lot like life with the Lord? When I look at what He's given me, the talents and giftings from Him, the experiences I've lived through as I've grown to trust Him, there's every reason to be confident that I have everything I need to accomplish what He gives me to do. It's just that sometimes He may ask me to make new and different "mixtures" in order to arrive at an outcome, instead of falling back on my old tried-and-true methods.

Lately He's taken away from me a few of my old reliable methods and means and asked me to be open to new leadings from Him. We've left the church we attended and have loved for almost 11 years to move on to something new. He's taken away from me some things I'd grown quite confident of having at hand, a lot like that range of green pastel sticks that I put aside last week.

I'm not to plunge in and willy-nilly mix things up just to get moving, but to wait for Him to show me what He wants of me. If it's to be 'green', and I have no green sticks, He may ask me to try a few new mixes to see the results. I very much enjoyed the creative challenge of making green without green, and I think the painting above is successful as a composition, with a good range of values and interesting details. But the highlight of the piece is the color green, which is in actuality a product of the process used to arrive at it.

As am I.

This child of God is a WIP (work in progress) but it's good to find yourself in the hands of the Master Creator.

Deborah