Inescapable and Inevitable

"Inescapable and Inevitable" - acrylic on cradled wood panel, 12" x 12" x .75".  Ready to hang (Sides are painted; no need to frame.  Hanging wire attached)  Available here and at Artfinder.

Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and a parcel of every path, asking for its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.
- David Whyte, Consolations

What is it about the forest that unlocks my heart and lets the floodgates open?  It seems I cannot enter that holy place without the rawness of what is real inside spilling over into the daily normal I so carefully cultivate as a modern human.  Nature, it seems, is there to strip away the outer shell of my humanity and leave me with the very real essence of what is me.

Inescapable and Inevitable

I don't mind it, that place of real being.  It reminds me of what I have chosen - to be open-hearted and vulnerable in the world.  The price of admission to open-heartedness is that moment of surrender to what we cannot control or change.  Acceptance.  I open my two hands and release that which I have held closely, allowing it to transform into whatever it will be,

---

About the art - This is the first piece in a new series, called "A View from the Gorge".  There is an experimental technique here - choosing wood panel for its very woodiness, scraping through very wet paint to expose the wood grain as part of  simulated trees.  As always, trying to hover on the edge of abstraction and realism.  Choosing a fluorescent underpainting as the most unlikely of starts, but knowing that sometimes the light in the gorge actually does have an otherworldly luminescence.