I am so happy that the spring is finally here. I can actually feel my spirit being lifted with all the wonder of spring. This past winter was depressing in many aspects when it comes to the sad happenings in the world. Now I am actually starting to feel some hope, which was hard for me to find on a daily basis until recently. I know that a good attitude is crucial in making good decisions. Our emotions tend to influence the choices we make, so, when we are in a good space emotionally, it is easier to have clarity and make good decisions. This is basically why any and all toxicity is undesirable. It is not easy living in this world of duality. There is light and dark everywhere and in all of us on planet earth and I think what matters is what you give power to and what you feed in your thoughts on a regular basis. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and as human beings we all make mistakes. But it is good to keep in mind that some great discoveries have come out of so called mistakes and accidents. There is a long list of these in science and I am not going to list them all here. But in example, the discovery of the adhesive used in Post-it Notes was first by accident and so was penicillin among countless other discoveries. The thing to keep in mind is that it is important to try new things and step into the unknown. It is not easy for any of us to overcome the fear of the unknown. But nevertheless, in order to expand, we need to dare. Doing the same things over and over again will likely lead to more or less the same results. Although in reality nothing is ever exactly the same. As the saying goes, we cannot step into the same river twice. However, our expectations do influence results, maybe even significantly so. There is proof of this in science also. So keeping an open mind and following cues is also very valuable. As you might know, I have been working on my The Joy of Design series for around ten years now. I started this series by painting small square acrylic paintings on stretched canvas. After a while I expanded into creating compilations with digital scans of these painting, many of which exist. Most well known of these are The Joy of Design Mandala Series Puzzles, which combine a selected set of the painting scans in The Joy of Design series. I arrange these selected painting scans nine times in different order in each series and I currently have eight series of these nine arrangements each completed. There are currently a total of 67 completed original acrylic paintings in The Joy of Design series, out of which I have created a number of quadrupled arrangements with the first 64. Besides inverting and color altering these works, most recently I have also started to alter these arrangements by focusing on certain parts of the image and abstracting the rest of the work even further and also cropping out what seems unessential to the new image. I have included my TJOD Revelation 1 here to show what I am talking about. You can obtain this art printed on demand at FAA/Pixels by clicking on this link: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/tjod-revelation-1-helena-tiainen.html.
You can also view this same info by clicking on the image or the title. In general in my very intuitive artmaking processes I try to follow ideas that come to me as long as they have a "yes" feeling about them. Most of the time these cues work out and even when they don't I always learn something new and likely valuable.
