a detail from a large painting

Here's the central area of a painting that I began in 2002. It's hung in other people's homes, been rolled up in a closet, and finally finished - as far as I was concerned, last Summer. Sometimes the process of painting can be lengthy. Often what gets in the way is some preconceived idea of what I want to happen. At some point I have to understand when that that I want is not what the painting will do, and then try to understand what can be done. In this case, as in most cases, the solution was more satisfying than what I was trying to do. I suppose that often I am trying to something very conventional, and for a while I'm able to be conventional, but then a point arrives where conventionality doesn't work. That's what imagination is for: to give us the resources to overcome the limitations or live with the limitations of the conventional. Perhaps that is where beauty, before unsuspected in life, waits for us, in that liminal space where we are forced by limit experiences to eschew conventional solutions. Is there a scripture for this? Perhaps Jesus is a liminal space.