Rainy day february..all gray and browns
the maples in the thickets are criss crossed
like so many lines, words.

Writing in my painting
Painting writing
Drawing, the hand to the paper
the etched line
the earnestness of
feeling brought through the hand
kinetic, like running, like springing
like stirring the delicious stew
to feed my loved ones.
.

On The Edge Of A Dream
The painting with the guitar
and the orange ochre space
green falling on the edge, like hair
or tears or your presence.
The bold yellow of a far off hill
or the sky
dreams of mountains
and a field where white
green and blue intermix
create an earth for your treading
or a meadow of memory
that fails to clarify
though it tries
through its spring grasses
vibrant summer
and the long brown bed of autumn.

photostreams and timelines

tweets and tags

home page newsfeed

likes and shares

all

want

attention

now.

In the studio- takes an hour to warm up on a day with little sun
making due
with very few
supplies....paint running low
and I'm rationing.
Paper torn in horizontal strips
a roll of canvas from many years ago
how does charcoal
pencil and watered paint
take to raw canvas?
I'm finding out.

This out of Poets&Writer's Magazine:

"A man's life is nothing but an extended trek through the detours of art to recapture those one or two moments when his heart first opened"
Albert Camus

and this 

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination"
John Keats

I am back in a sketching mode.."the sketch " series?
this seems to happen at this time of year for me..
the nakedness of the trees, the barren quality of the landscape,
or scratching and digging to find the nub?
something extremely appealing about the gesture...
poems embedded
images incorporating the words
and mosses
and grasses..the earth
peeling back the layers, or
the layers we can't see

 

 

 

 

I am happy to be included in this group show overseas.  Those of you in London..head over to 44 Emerald Street tomorrow and check out this show!  For others check out the web site kpkgallery.com

Back at the studio and painted over the painting from two days ago..my ideas are not clear.
last year,  this time, i got down on the floor and started drawing...
feel like i need to do that again or the idea of banners or using grasses or natural dyes (but something where i can experience the intensity of color)
working out from the 10x8 series theme of "Between"
Layers, layers of love

what is between the layers?

what is "it" that creates the layer?

A poem by Susan Cooper.

 And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.


Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

 ________________________

And this by Raymond Carver.

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth. 

Autumn..November
We change clocks back this weekend, so morning is lighter, evening darker, and our time of light in this northeastern land, becomes shorter as we spiral in toward the winter solstice.
Working on a series of new paintings, "Between"

What small secret lies between
the sky and the sea
a glimmer, a possibility?  What pleasure
lies between, knowing and not
knowing you, my dream
as love journeys from shore to shore.
And isn't heaven on earth
here, where fire meets air
in a nebulous, mysterious dance?
And how many times
in this circle of autumn
have I spied the great heron
lifting his muscled wings
in a thrust to rise above
the fertile marshland, hovering between
the dusk of ancient sand, and the country
of you I am courting daily.

Gallery sitting in high summer, in downtown Castine at the Tarratine, co-op gallery of six members.  Brought with me flower bouquets from my garden, gathered and bundled by my youngest daughter.  Brought with me my ukulele, and have already strummed a tune.  The fan powered by a hydro dam so many miles away is blowing beautiful warm air.  I write on this computer after it has been charged..again, from the same source.
Back one week now from a weekend away in a wondrous field in the western mountains of Vermont.
A community gathered, our intention pure, our hearts open, our willingness to put down our clocks and cell phones and mirrors and computers.  Our willingness to remember and give thanks for this luscious green earth, our willingness to still our being, without thought to what comes next, but to be the chant, be the song in the night, be the human grateful to the earth for feeding us so richly.

 This remembering, this stilling is where I try to go in my creative work.  It is as though through the work I am trying to put form to essence.  I am trying to bring forth the buried familiar.  I want to communicate, this is very important to me.  I believe by trying to get to the deep root, the nub of myself, that what I pull forth will be part of what any of us has within.  Our connection with all nature, our human family, the story of our creativity, our openness, our power.  When the great majority of us at age six or seven stop drawing and painting as a language, as a way of giving, as a way of communicating, we cut off a huge vehicle for understanding ourselves in the world, we start closing off our openness, our ability to receive the gifts from the "holy".

What excites me about my creative process is coming into this place of reception, and through this, through the forms and color, the shapes and the raggedy lines, I hope others will see a glimmer of something they have perhaps left behind, or are attempting to open themselves to.
I am not interested in replication, I am interested in what happens when one opens up to the infinite possibilities and finds form to express what we cannot describe, but we feel; like divine, like the deep forest place, like the essence of water, like love, like happiness.

Thank you to Jane Dahmen , for your beautiful work, which lead me to write, which lead you to inquire, of my knowledge of Kimura, which I had none, and now through interstate library loans have had in my hands reproductions of his paintings, a feast for my eyes and soul! a blessing to have discovered them in this late winter turn spring. Kin.

To Kimura
Expanse of color fields and layers of looking
within, beyond the physicality.
The land felt.
The light remembered. In your paintings
I hear children's voices, violet hue of new leaves
the tree in the garden standing
through winter's white storm raging
driving rain and roots traveling
deeply come spring
like weaving, pulsing
prodding like love.


"Drawing is a process of printing the light on one's soul."
Chuta Kimura


And a poem by W.S. Merwin
the back of the book "The River Sound"

The String

Night the black bead
a string running through it
with the sound of breath

lights are still there
long ago when
they were not seen

in the morning
it was explained
to me that the one

we call the morning star
and the evening
star are the same.


 

 Last official day of winter..spring equinox is upon us, and I'll watch for the rise of the perigee moon in its fullness tonight.  Snow still lies in patches in the woods, at the sides of driveways and roads, and in huge heaps, still,  at ends of parking lots.  I pray for those in Japan, those whose lives have been swept away, the rattle of the repercussions, the big wave.  I pray for family and friends near and far, who are grieving, who are care givers, who are walking slowly down a healing path.
Every spring I am stricken with the grandeur of the returning green world, the life that has lain hidden beneath winter's cloak, the palpable warmth of the sun, and life blood running through all trees.
This charge of energy is at once invigorating and exhausting, after the long winter of silence and still, of non moving and hidden, of slumber and dreams.
My painting has come slowly this winter.  Much time in the studio spent thinking, and pondering, waiting for the next phase, which has shown itself and now I feel like I need long days, unlimited supplies.
In looking back over my work of the last twenty years, I have started to see a journey...

My work has always been about "nurturing the inner life", and our connection with nature, and in the beginning the paintings took on the shape of landscape, but were metaphorical.  The power animals came through and enticing horizons.  It was as though I was looking at this "interior life " as a spectator, while at the same time I was newly mothering and tearing down old houses and building up new.  As time progressed and my daughters got older, my art changed, the horizons disappeared and recognizable forms starting emerging from color fields..at first domestic, simple forms, birds, flowers, vases, beds, then the windows came and doorways, and there was a time when there was always a window or a doorway.  I was deep into motherhood and a partnership, homeownership, yet living on the edge financially and spiritually.  Open to the talk of trees, lives gone on before, my world felt rich and deep, but with a profound sadness and urgency towards the message of beauty and love amidst the daily disregard for these things that I perceived in so much of the world around me.

"When You Find Your Way"

Now after twenty five years I feel as if I have walked through these portals and they have taken me to an even deeper spot.  Not darker necessarily but messier, void of all those recognizable entities in my life, like diving into leaves and burrowing or walking deep into the woods without a trail, or pushing through to a place I have never been, and through my hands the forms take shape, the image arises, the colors speak and I am filled with gratefulness.
We all have this place of newness, the times in our lives when we need to shed a skin, and be open to not knowing.  It is in this place that we can connect to our humanness,  not our faith or religion as separate from ourselves, but the holy that "is" us..the god-like place within us..like the power of moving mountains, the depth of waters, the intricacies of all living things..the life blood of trees in spring.
The earth..our holy place.
And being open to that concept is within each one of us, if we open ourselves to the possibility.