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Faulty View

5/19/2022

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Picture
Faulty View
"Faulty View" - mixed media on paper, 21 x 21.  Available here and at Artfinder.


Claude, you have a faulty view of my kin,
Our Corvus family is not responsible
For foot-tracks around your eyes
Or measuring a straight flying distance.
We would not stoop to the metaphor
abasement, such as ‘eating human.

- W.K. GOURLEY

​
The crows continue to roost in the studio.

Sketches and paintings and inspiration images and feathers. 

Rocky, our porch crow, looms large every day.  We recognize his voice, admire his demonstration of territorial ownership, leave him offerings of nuts, popcorn, corn on the cob and eggs.
We've become those people.  The ones who wander with pockets filled with peanuts, chucking and clucking and calling the crows.  And now, often, the crows call us.  Or swoop silently over our shoulders to land in a tree limb ahead, waiting for the morning offerings.  There is great joy in this, for us.  Making contact, forming recognition, learning each other's ways.

It has become a lovely pause in a tumultuous world.  Our eyes and ears are atuned to the crows, leaving little space for news and chaos.  I think of it fondly as crow meditation. :)

About the art:  this piece is painted on one of my new favorite substrates - craft paper.  Once gesso'd, this paper takes a beating and forms delicious textured wrinkles and warps, creating an overall leathery texture and heft on a thin plane.  

Beginning with black gesso'd paper taped to a board, drawing the bird with white charcoal and then adding water and paint to form a value sketch.  Continuing to add the requisite 80 million layers of acrylic paint, this time choosing a very dark, limited palette.  Using the sprayer bottle, squeegee and rubber wedge to force the paper to wrinkle and warp, enjoying the way subsequent light layers cling to the high points in the texture and leave the valleys dark.  Resisting the urge to overly define all but eye and feet.

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The Night Will Give you a Horizon

5/3/2022

4 Comments

 
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.


When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.


Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.


There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.


The dark will be your womb
tonight.


The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.


You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.


Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.


Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn


anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
​

is too small for you.

​"Sweet Darkness", David Whyte


Picture
The Night Will Give You a Horizon



​"The Night Will Give You a Horizon" - mixed media on wood panel, 18" x 24".  Ready to hang.  Available here and at Artfinder.
There's a lot going on in the world right now.

It makes me tired to think about it.  But think about it I must, we all must, because war and disease and the economy and the people making decisions on our behalf effect us.  The key, I believe, is not overthinking about it. 

I'm a big overthinker.   It comes with being introverted, highly sensitive and a survivor of a measure of trauma.  There are worlds of thinking in my head that are ever expanding during times of strife.  So Whyte's words, the reminder to "give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong", places that brain of mine back in the present moment - this peanut butter sandwich on my desk, the sound of the crow outside, the in and out breath.  

Anything (or anyone) that does not bring us alive, dear reader, is too small for us.  

About the art:  beginning with a wood panel thickly gesso'd in black.  Using colored charcoal and blocking in shapes based on an inspiration photo from a sunset on the rocky Oregon shoreline.  Grabbing the gist of the scene with layers of fiery oranges and then building rocks and pools and edges with a palette knife laden with acrylic paint.  Liberal use of spray bottle, squeegee, rubber wedge and chopsticks (for carving into the paint).  Dollops of colored pencil.  Thin washes of paint mixed with matte medium for the sky.  Resisting the desire to overly define.  Allowing paint to move.

​This piece. moves, me...I hope it moves you, too. xo
4 Comments

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Picture
Here's the blue wild, where
tiny dreamers ride beasts, speak
​ birdsong, hold the moon.

(by poet Mary W. Cox)
​


​Art prints available on request
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