Coming Home

"Coming Home"  oil and cold wax on paper, 15 x 10.5.   Available here and at Artfinder.


“was always a strange thing, coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and, in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd, then, to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past. How could this place still be there, if the you that once lived there no longer existed?” 
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Oh, what a lovely, craggy, cliff-hugging hike I'm having in the studio!

Cold wax and oil is the closest thing to the deeply organic, geologically-astounding, gritty and basalt-y layers of the Columbia River Gorge you can get while standing indoors.

Coming Home

And simultaneously reading aloud another book featuring a wandering monk and robot is the next best thing to actually wandering the countryside while being curled up on the sofa on a dark, rainy evening.

The meandering dynamic duo (the. monk and robot, not the husband and myself, though we are, indeed) have a way of tackling philosophy in the sweetest ways, often leaving me smiling and teary simultaneously.   Like today's passage and the idea that home is always part of our past, and then when we return to it we are never the same person who once lived there.  Whoa.

Which is exactly how I feel returning home from a hike, a walk or a wander, or after painting something  - creating a new world that wasn't there before, and being altered by the process of creating it.  The Lola who enters the studio is never the same one who exists.  

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About the art:  beginning (as I am in 2023) with an old painting which has been gesso'd over.  In this case, the painting was also cut in half.  Jumping off from a hike-inspired photo and beginning to build the layers with thin washes of oil added with a rubber wedge and draaaaaagggged hither and yon.  Adding layers of thicker paint and paint mixed with cold wax with a palette knife.  Dragging the paint into vertical cliffs with a rubber wedge.  Carving back into the layers of paint with oil pencils and a scribbly hand.  Walking away as a new Lola.