A Summer Collage

Collage 

is a word that comes to me often lately. I move through time and space seeking images for my work, even following them as they lead me from one adventure to another. 

Every single place, person and moment is offered up as material for translation into paint.

Life and Art fuse.

 

 

  

A bountiful summer of road trips and travel has filled my imagination with an abundance of fresh images to work from over the coming winter months. A new bike purchased in the Spring opened up new vistas to explore, both urban and country. 

 I visited a variety of cities from Montreal to Saskatoon, Lake Placid to Middlebury & Burlington, Vermont as well as a hefty dose of New York City.

 I roamed museums and art galleries, climbed mountains and took subways, explored graffiti on urban bridges as well as the minute lichen on ancient precambrian rocks. 

  

 

Regardless of whether I am walking in the city or in the woods, the textures and shapes swirl around me asking to be translated into paint. The left brain has "names for things" but when I relax into the images themselves the names seem to take a back seat and objects dissolve into shapes, textures and colours. 


These images hold a keen intelligence which is also a great advocate of questions rather then answers. I feel that questions hold more potential for awareness and understanding then the dead end of pact answers. This translation of living images opens up an endless world of breathtaking and inexplicable meaning for me.

Often in life as well as in making art, a colour or a shape makes a surprise appearance. When this happens I try and step back, relinquish control and allow it to happen. I am usually pleasantly surprised with the new discovery that is offered up to me.  I paint to learn what I need to know.

   

Sometimes I'm on top of a mountain and sometimes I'm on top of a building in NYC

 I love this juxtaposition of energies. The deep wilderness one day and the top of a skyscraper the next. This keeps things fresh and vital as I am forced to never take any moment for granted and everything appears as it is in the moment without familiarity.

Shifting light and dark, both real and metaphorically inform the paintings from the inside out.

I have learned to be comfortable while holding this tension of opposites and uncertainty. 

 The more I evolve as a painter the more the world takes on an inner glow of beauty. 

I like to look at things from various perspectives, upside down and inside out. I am always looking, looking, looking at the way the world spins round. There is beauty hiding in the smallest nooks and crannies just waiting to be seen. Changing perspectives creates new relationships between things and this is an endlessly fascinating process.

There is beauty in rhythms and patterns. There is beauty in curves and angles. Once the beauty starts to show up, it's almost impossible not to see it.

 

 Beauty is the alive awareness and expression of life in everything, even in a broken heart or a broken fence.

Painting is a complete celebration of Life for me! 

Life in all it's miraculous and astonishing moments: 

when it is funny and light hearted but also when it is deeply sad and sobering...sometimes all at the same time.

  

 

 The patterns and energies show up in people as well as rocks, forests and rivers. We are all made of the same molecules and sometimes there is no separation between any of these vibrating molecules be they human or otherwise.

 

There is nothing for me to do but look deeply and absorb it all as best I can. Then let it come forth translated into the shapes and forms it chooses to take on the canvas.

  

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes art.

~Rumi

  

Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

~Rumi