The Sediment of Youth

The Sediment of Youth

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"The Sediment of Youth" oil on gallery wrapped canvas,  
​30 x 40 x 1.5 inches.   This item is unframed but ready to hang.
 (click on the image to purchase)

Give me silvery strands,
the milky growth of aging
intertwined with the sediment
of youth.
Give me stretch marks
along thighs,
one gleaming stripe
for each year this body
survived winter.
Give me scars and sunspots,
proof of every season
weathered.
Give me laugh lines
like the hyena,
rooted canyons along
eyes and mouth,
impervious to wrinkle cream,
so profound was our joy.
- WILD by DANIELLE COFFYN

Oh geez.

Coffyn might have peered into my mind and witnessed me seeing myself in the mirror.  Laugh lines like a hyena?  Yup.  Gleaming stripes of stretch marks? Yep.  Rooted canyons (impervious to wrinkle cream) - heck yeah.  In a world of airbrushed beauty and AI generated models, it is so tempting to find fault with all the physical evidence of every season.  But myself hears everything I think and say, and I am becoming more and more convinced that all of that self dialogue ought to be positive, accepting, celebrating and loving.  

​​Because it is all intertwined with the sediment of youth.  Young me is there.  She is the foundation of all this.  But me at 62 is the craggy, many layered cliffside with fossils poking out and compressed rock formations. built atop that sediment.  Impressive, imposing, weighty and weathered.  A triumphant monument to a full life.

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You may have been wondering where the abstracts have been lately.

They were all tied up in this one BIG piece, which asked for weeks of work and layers (and layers and LAYERS) of paint. A departure from my more usual abstract style, but I am just tickled with it.  Perhaps I've been watching too many of Brian Rutenbergs studio videos on YouTube - his works are huge!  The satisfaction of laying down thick layers of paint with a massive rubber wedge and brush is pretty big, too.  And carving back through thick paint with a chopstick is mmmmmmm good.

This piece is part of my annual painting murder season, where a dozen or so paintings are destroyed, gesso'd and/or painted over to clear away the old and make room for the new.  For this one, I flipped it and drew the new design right on top of the acrylic underpainting using a UniPosca paint pen, then commenced with the layers of oil paint.  A complete transformation, I'd say!

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A big welcome to the new blog readers and subscribers from Bluesky!  Hooray!  Your presence here makes this an even better place to be. :)

The January Reader Giveaway continues!  Leave a comment on any blog post this month to be automatically entered.  Someone is going to win an original piece of art - free!  Now that's something to celebrate!