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
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.
