Ever-Evolving Earth and a Meditation on Texture by Annie DIllard

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time. Landscape is the texture of intricacy, and texture is my present subject. Intricacies of detail and varieties of form build up into textures. A bird's feather is an intricacy; the bird is a form; the bird in space in relation to air, forest, continent, and so on, is a thread in a texture. Wherever there is life, there is twist and mess: the frizz of an arctic lichen the tangle of a brush along a bank, the dogleg of a dog's leg, the way a line has got to curve, split, or knob. The planet is characterized by its very jaggedness, its random heaps of mountains, its frayed fringes of shore.

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean  about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek. ~ Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Ever-Evolving Earth 72" x 54" acrylic

 

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The Shock of Touch

Movement, change, light growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue. ~Andy Goldsworthy

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The Tree with the Lights Inside

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell bursting with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly on fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. ~Annie Dillard "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

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The Painter Eva Hesse

The hell with them all. Paint yourself out, through and through, it will come by you alone. You must come to terms with your own work not with any other being.

-Eva Hesse

Forest Paintings

Several of the forest paintings done recently and presently hanging in Montreal Exhibition "Painting from Inside the Landscape"

Natura Imaginalis  24" x 30"

 

Breathing 48" x 60"

 

Invest in Gold 24" x 30"

 

Primal Source 24" x 30"

 

Telluric Rhythms 36" x 48" 

 

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Montreal's Atwater Market

A short walk from my studio, the Atwater Market is a constant source of ever changing colors, scents and beauty to nourish all the senses. My absolute favorite season however is autumn, the golden change of light falling over all the rich earthy colors. The market is humming with the bounty of the harvest, crisp apples of every possible variety, the last of the luscious field tomatoes, multi-patterned squash, and just before the Canadian Thanksgivng a dazzling array of "mums" that seem to be the earth itself expressing her love for life. I walk through these jewels of and from the earth and feel a deep, satisfying gratitude for all that is.

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