Living Openly on the Edge

Living Openly on the Edge

"Living Openly on the Edge" - mixed media on repurposed wood panel, 12" x 12" x .75".  Ready to hang (Sides are painted; no need to frame.  Hanging wire is attached)  Available here and at Artfinder.

We are nothing but shores
​laying ourselves before the
clear depth of all that is,
letting it wash over us.

In this, we are forever
translators, not through
our minds or by how we
conjugate verbs, but by
living openly on the edge.

- Mark Nepo, Drinking From the River of Light

The studio has become a mountain, a forest, the sky.  Boards strewn  about with landscapes - mountain-scapes, forest-scapes, rock-scapes - all the things my mind continues to see long after the hike is over.

On a recent day-trip to Cape Horn in the gorge, a hop over a barrier fence led to the edge of a cliff at the top of a mountain.  A place I wouldn't normally go (this girl has a bit of a thing with heights) and yet there we were.   Standing, then sitting.  Staying.  There - at the edge of  all that is.  

Breathing in, I am the mountain.  Breathing out, the mountain is me.   And so I become the shore, high above the waterline,  able to feel the clear depth wash over me.

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​About the art: using watered gesso and a rubber wedge to carve "rocks" into a piece of repurposed wood.  Allowing the random patterns to present opportunities for further definition, and allowing the natural wood grain to peek through and become the striations in the "rocks".   Resisting the urge to overly delineate one shape from another- to allow the painting to live on the edge between abstraction and realism.