Creating From the Inside Out

Module 1 · Lesson 4: Inner Necessity

Hello Hello friend! Welcome back to the Intuitive Watercolor Painting course series. This is the last lesson inside Module One out of five... and I just want to take a moment to acknowledge you for showing up to this work. Bravo! Whether you’ve moved through every exercise or you’re still finding your way through, remember… something in you said yes to this. Which is just so amazing and truly matters. You don’t need know why yet. Continue to let it all unfold to see what wants to happen through you.

And if you're here as a free subscriber and this intuitive watercolor series isn't quite your thing... thank you for still being here! I hope the free portion of these posts is offering something that stirs your own creative living, whether that's through the personal stories, the book recommendations, or simply a moment of quiet contemplation.

Before we get into today’s thoughts and lesson, as well as move into Module Two, I’d love to hear from you.

I already know where we’re going with all of these future lessons, and I’m so so excited to take you there! But I’m curious where you are...

I have so much I want to share inside this space of the Tender Hearth. It is a big heart container for so much that is ready to be shared, and I also want to honor the pace that actually allows things to integrate. So I’m genuinely asking... are you ready to continue forward into the next module, or would a short breath between feel better? A pause where we explore other dimensions of creative living together before diving deeper into the painting work.

If you’re a paid subscriber working through these lessons, would you drop one of these in the comments?

Option A: Ready to continue into Module Two.

Option B: I’d love a short pause to catch up and explore other creativity here first.

I’ll let your responses guide what comes next. Free subscribers are warmly welcome to chime in too! Thank you so much my dear readers. I’m so very grateful we are here together.

So with that, this week we’re moving into even deeper territory...

There’s a particular kind of creative pull that doesn’t really announce itself. It can often be an enigma. It’s quieter than inspiration. But quite persistent. It can show up as a color that keeps returning to you, or a restlessness in your body when you haven’t made anything in a while. If you’re a long time artist that has stepped into a sacred pause or void, you may be very familiar with this elusive feeling, because it doesn’t always accompany a complete idea. More like a feeling of something incomplete until it finally moves through you. It may not be about a particular painting, but almost more like a tactile pull to just make marks. It could even be what brought you here into this course series in the first place!

I first directly engaged with this idea back in 2015, during my first 100 day project, and while reading Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must. I mean, I had been creating from an inner desire long before that... but during those 100 days of painting in a row, and discovering the language Elle gave to this feeling of “Must,” something clicked into place.

(Back in 2015, on my studio wall, claiming my feeling of “Must” and releasing all the “should’s”)

The more time I spent answering that feeling and creating from that intuitive well, the deeper it became. That desire to bring something onto paper in a tactile, somatic way only grew stronger the more I fed it. Many of those paintings weren’t cohesive to look at... I was exploring in ways I hadn’t before, feeling around in the dark in the best possible sense. But the more I experimented, I found a through line in what wanted to come through visually. Over the next few years, my work evolved a lot, as I was pulling ideas deeper and deeper within. But, even as series evolve now, I can still see those same threads running through everything... certain shapes, colors, a frequency and tone that was there from the very beginning.

That is what we’re going to explore this week. What Kandinsky called, “Inner Necessity”. And we are going to view it through the lens of a living practice.

Two books, other than the one I mentioned above, are accompanying us into this realm, and I want to share them here because they’ve genuinely changed the way I understand what it means to paint from the soul. One I’ve had for quite some time and is well worn, and another is newer (soon to be well worn, god I love my books… can you tell?!), and really gave such deeper meaning to responding to this inner necessity regardless of who it is or isn’t for.

An Art of Our Own by Roger Lipsey traces how artists like Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Rothko weren’t making abstract work as an intellectual experiment. They were truly searching for something. Kandinsky gives us the phrase “inner necessity” and Lipsey shows how these artists drew from mystical and spiritual traditions to create a new kind of sacred art... one that came from the inside out.

The Other Side by Jennifer Higgie brings women abstract artists into the center of that same conversation, (can we say hallelujah!), many of whom had been doing this devotional, intuitive work for decades without the historical recognition they deserved, (I am so glad this is changing… it’s about time! Slow... but it’s happening). Higgie shows how abstraction became a language for these incredible women artists, that couldn’t otherwise be said.

I chose to share these together because they give us a fuller, truer picture of what painting from the soul has looked like in the past, and how we can learn from it, for our own unique work.

And if you want to continue deepening your understanding of the clairs we explored in the last lesson, Clair... What? by April Lugo is a beautiful companion for that.

The paid section holds the card pull, the full lesson and painting practice, and reflection prompts to help you go deeper. If you’ve been curious about joining, all the lessons are waiting for you starting at Lesson 1. By the way, there’s no need to catch up, just begin where it begins!