James Watrous Show!

The work is at the Gallery! 

Thought I would post my statement for the show followed by the poem for which the painting I am working on in the photos is titled: :The Peace of Wild Things.

 "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the

Universe”, John Muir.

Sometimes whole vistas emerge, other times it is a dead bird, bee or butterfly my

husband finds and brings to me, sometimes it is a pressed specimen, but most often

the work is about sitting low on the ground looking down or out at arm’s length. The

life scale heightens the verisimilitude; smells are evoked, sounds are not far. The

images are of plants connected to other plants, connected to dirt, connected to a

season, connected to a place, connected to a person. While painting Hepatica which

derives its name from the three lobes of the liver I was smelling the earth, my vision

seeped with the green sheen and fuzz of the leaves, another experience was evoked.

One of prayer for my cousin, who as a young woman has liver cancer. These

emotions, conditions are linked in the Universe. When painting a Lady’s Slipper with

its bulbous, bilaterally symmetrical flower poised on its leggy stem, I thought about the

symbiotic relationship of plant and fungus and about the beauty and strength of my

daughters how they will grow and go out in the wide world, and about the plants other

name Moccasin Flower...all this, evoked thoughts of solitude. Solitary flower, my

solitude painting, and now yours as you look, as no one else can, into this painting of a

plant that is connected to the peace of the woods and the “day-blind stars”.

These paintings are slow; filled with wind, changing light, breezes, mosquitoes and animal sounds... While in the field, much concentration is needed, the work is at times arduous-- at other times like a meditation.


Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” is the title of the painting I am making above.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.