Dark River Voice

As I walk I begin to leave behind the visual noise of town. A welcome insulation of stillness falls around me. I breathe in the cool air and breathe out the hot fire of pressing thoughts.

 

I notice how the light falls and illuminates certain patterns, my eyes begin to open to what is there before me. I start to notice all the life within the pulsating silence.

 

Patterns begin to emerge.

 

A surprise bridge brings a direct encounter with the thick, slow movement of a partially frozen river in all her delicious darkness.

 

She unfolds herself leisurely, sensuously winding along the frozen shoreline.

 

I am taken with her dark beauty and pause to watch & listen as her shimmering reflections speak in all their nuances of grey.

 

An unexpected light thrills me with warmth, illuminating the river's wintery & somber demeanor.

 

She radiates a glowing smile from her sleepy winter journey.

 

I watch attentively as she reveals more of herself in undulating curves of such beauty that I feel myself falling...

 

in love again. Her beauty has no limits, as she begins to speak through her curves, her shapes, her sounds, her colors..

 

I can feel only love, expressed in curves so sweet I want to cry out in wonder.

 

Shapes shift.

 

Water moves.

 

Perception is altered. I am restored. I will return to my studio and attempt to translate into paint this river's rich and resonant voice of winter.

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Singing Rocks & Howling Wolves

 

 

Five years ago while painting in the woods, I had an encounter with a wolf. That creature's golden eyes pierced through my heart and opened up a much neglected wild place within. My life tore open in ways I could never have imagined prior to meeting with his feral gaze. I started to paint ferociously. My "safe" lovely watercolor landscapes could no longer contain the wild energy that I felt building within. I began to paint larger, then I changed mediums, first oil and now acrylics. I left behind any people, places or habits that could not support this new passionate energy surging up through my body and spilling out onto the canvas in a frighteningly violent manner. Several months into this explosion I was diagnosed with breast cancer and in between daily radiation treatments I would paint, paint, paint. I walked through the woods and started to experience the earth's body as my own. I recognized a deep connection that I had always understood intellectually but now I was feeling it inside my own body. This is now the place I paint from, that deep wilderness within. A wilderness that sings, and screams and howls with terror and beauty. Yesterday was one of those days in the studio where the earth's voice just came flooding through my body and bursting onto the canvas in all her textures, shapes and forms. I am in love with paint and all it teaches me about this bond with the earth, and that wolf keeps howling deep within.

 

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Holly Friesen on The Arts Map

Holly Friesen on The Arts Map