Bubbles

Artist: Gaven

This is a great picture! Okay, maybe for you in doesn’t mean anything or even look like very much, but for me it puts a feeling of inspiration into a concrete form.

As the title indicates, the picture is just a bunch of bubbles. Before drawing this pastel I had sketched out a few pictures of bubbles, but none of them were terribly great. It wasn’t until I had breakfast with Laura that I finally had the picture in my head that I wanted to draw.

So maybe I should start there.

I was lucky enough to have breakfast one morning with Laura. I actually didn’t know her that well, but my good friend Chantal was close to her, so I figured I should get to know her a little better if the opportunity arose.

The breakfast was a short one because Laura had to run off to a meeting, but while she was getting ready, she made me a peanut butter bagel and entertained me with a slide show of pictures from some of the trips she’d been on around the world (here is where I found out that Laura is an incredibly thoughtful host). While looking through the picture, I came across a picture of Laura blowing some bubbles. It was beautiful! The bubbles were emitting such a diverse set of vibrant colours.

Later that night I headed off to Shy’s for a painting party (yes, shy is that cool!), and drew what I had remembered from the picture. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had fun with it. Actually, I drew the Nature Machine picture at the same party.

So who cares? Just a bunch of freakin’ bubbles! Well to understand why this means something to me, you have to understand a little more about me. I like to symbolize a lot of things in my life. I think of myself as a boat, I think of couples as ducks (cause you always see ducks in pairs), and to me, bubbles mean something specific, but it’s hard to explain, so bare with me here.

I think of bubbles as representing my scope of attention or concentration. Specifically, for any goal in my life, there exists an associated bubble which encompasses all the routes to that goal.

That sounds confusing. Here’s an example:

Imagine that your goal is that you want to meet some new interesting people. Well to do so, you usually go around and meet as many people as you can. Here your bubble would be expanding and encapsulating the new people that you are meeting. At a certain point you’ll realize that you’ve met 4 very interesting people. You then decide to devote your main attention on these 4 people, or another way you could look at it is that you are collapsing your bubble around the 4 people.

Well maybe it will be just me that finds bubbles interesting in this way. I’ll leave you now with the groovy picture that inspired me.