Third Anniversary of Gallery 46 in Lake Placid, NY

Three Year Birthday Celebration of Gallery 46 in Lake Placid, NY. I adore this "little gallery that could". A gallery that Lake Placid Center for the Arts began as a temporary installation on the Main Street and has become a thriving beacon of culture and community within the Adirondacks. 

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.

 

Ponderings from the Palm Coast

Grieving is like an altered state. Reality shifts in imperceptible ways. Memories and imagination trip over each other in the mind. Four and a half months ago Walt died. I still can't believe it when I type that sentence. I still hold out hope that he will be coming home any day now. 

Last night I dreamt that I spotted Walt in a crowd of people. I called out to him, he turned around and told me, "It's over." and then he started to run into the crowd. I panicked and ran after him. I continually lost and found him until I realized that he didn't want me to catch up to him. I stopped & I woke up. I felt very sad, depleted & empty.

       


I have been traveling a lot these past few months. Traveling helps me to stay present and live in the moment. When the comfort of our quotidian lives are stripped away we are forced to stay sharp and notice more around us. This focus keeps me feeling connected to the earth and the landscape. The landscape is where I draw my life force from. This connection is where the paintings come from. Walt knew this about me and now walks with me in the various landscapes I find myself, particularly beside the ocean, I feel his presence everywhere. 

What is it about Walt that I miss so much? His companionship, his wise council, his patience, and his enthusiasm for art and life. Walt inspired me to be all that I was, he inspired me to evolve into a better human being and make the greatest art I could. He did all this without saying a word rather he encouraged me to unfold in my own unique way by holding a sacred space for me to become. He never wanted me to be anything other then who I was. He gave me the room I needed to move through space and time fully and completely as myself. Walt didn't do this just for me but for every human being he encountered. Walt was an old soul, his deep brown eyes with their penetrating gaze told me so. We often spoke of how long it had taken us to find each other. He spoke of searching for me for thousands of years and I used to laugh at this idea. Now I am not so sure and I hope that we will be able to find each other once again in the vast eternities of the universe. However what is time when compared to the ancient rhythms of the ocean.



The breathing of the ocean is soul soothing. The waves come in and the waves go out. The tides flow in rhythm with the moon. Every minute the view changes in colors, shadows and textures. The patterns in the sea foam shift, the light sparkles and plays with the salty sea. The wide open space allows my being to expand and soar. Sometimes I become the sea, sometimes the sky.

I am listening. I sit or walk by the ocean every day and she whispers and roars her ancient sounds to my grieving soul. Sometimes I take notes of these sounds in watercolor sketches.

I read, I walk, I float, I think, I feel, I breathe.

Life has been unalterably changed for me with the loss of Walt. 

His presence lives on in the great beautiful mystery.

               

Where do we go when we die? 

When will I see you again?

What is it like on the other side?

Walt and I were both fond of the following words from Rainer Maria Rilke and they remain pinned to the studio wall beside Walt's photo:

"...try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Across the Prairies

#trip_the_light has been on the road for 10 days now and I am dreadfully behind in my blog posts but wonderfully filled up with painting and writing material for many months to come.

I last posted in Northern Ontario where the beauty was boundless and all encompassing.

I am so in love with the landscape and how it is always changing and revealing different aspects of itself. I am currently reading PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon and it is an eloquent and deep exploration of one particular landscape in Kansas. The book is full of delightful quotes but this one struck me in particular was this one:

I like to think of landscape not as a fixed place but as  path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet.

To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety, come in. 

-Gretel Ehrlich "Landscape," introduction to Legacy of Light (1987)

This seems to be what we are doing as we travel these marvelous routes and roads and allow the places to speak their own language to us as we pass through them.

     

A wooden suspension bridge leads the way to Ouimet Canyon.

Yoga, Art and the Spring Equinox

When does winter end and when does Spring begin?

Today I got up at 5:30 am and committed to an annual Spring ritual. A local yoga studio celebrates the Spring Equinox with a daily 7am morning yoga session.  I am NOT a morning person, I am a night owl, staying up into the wee hours of the night. However the morning always offers me a gift when I decide to crawl out of my warm duvet trailing dreamtime with me as I stumble around in the dark getting ready.  This morning's gift was the color of the sky, I don't think there is a word for the blue that I experienced this morning. I had to clean the snow, yes, MORE snow from my car and as I looked up, there was that sky! A blue so deep it was filled with the dreams of those still sleeping. My reward for getting up.

Rapture in a Mosaic Sky / 36" x 48" / acrylic on canvas

I was so happy to arrive at the yoga studio in this "in between time". It was still dark enough that I had my car lights on to drive and the yoga studio was lit with candles.

Presence

An exhibition of recent paintings that are the result of years of learning and growing and becoming. All the joys & sorrows from where the spirit meets the bone are in these paintings. Late night howling and mid day spirit-rides with the wind are all mixed into the pigment.

WARMTH

Stir it Up by Walt Pascoe

For the past couple of months I have been wearing my curator's hat. Having worked as curator for ArtBomb for 16 months I became acquainted with many Montreal artists and their diverse artworks.

Open Studio ~ Friday, November 28, 2014

There is so much great energy in the studio these days that I have decided to open the studio door and welcome in visitors from 3pm to 7pm on Friday.

Lots of new work and a great time to catch up with some of you!

Chaos Breeds Creativity

When I enter the studio I shed all my quotidian duties and enter the realm of the imagination. This is the place where rationality and pragmatism have little worth. My mind is allowed to slip into chaos, where everything is fresh and new and waiting to be born for the first time. In the summer I paint outside but I also take endless photos of everywhere I go...photos of colors, textures, shapes. I often leave these piles of photos lying everywhere.

 I have tried to organize the photos but they always end up in piles and boxes littered all over the studio. I use them as reference but not just one, all of them! It is their strewn presence that evokes memories, smells, sights, sounds and even tastes for me as I paint.

Sometimes I sketch from them and have many of these sketch books lying around as well. They are like notes to myself, or notes of a song that has yet to be written. I like having them around me as partially resolved ideas for paintings, nudging their way into my consciousness as I work.

Preparing for the Inhale

Thanksgiving week-end has given me time to reflect on the gratitude I feel for being alive in this moment in this place and with the people who surround me. 

It has been an ever expanding exhale all summer long and even into the autumn months. I have been walking trails, climbing mountains, swimming in lakes and fully immersed in the outdoors as much as possible.

       

Now it is time to take all that extraverted energy and turn it inward in one long inhale over the winter. All the sights, sounds, smells and textures of the living, breathing earth will find their way into my paintings if I am still enough to hear them.

I can't wait to return to my studio for some quiet, solitary months at the easel processing all the beautiful impressions of the summer and autumn months. 

Every year that goes by my impressions appear to broaden and deepen from within and without. The whole landscape seems numinous to me at times. I often feel as though the natural world is lit up from within and radiating beauty and mystery. The more I paint the more I see and more often than not I feel rich beyond my wildest dreams with all that is there in and around me. Its a mystery I don't even want to know the answer to.

Upcoming Open Studio

 

Open Studio - Thursday, June 5th from 3pm to 8pm

Come and share a glass of wine and check out the artwork.

Click on the Eventbrite link in the right hand column and register for a chance to win one of my paintings in a draw which you can enter simply by dropping by!

(All the info and directions are also included in the Eventbrite Invitation) 

Looking forward to seeing you all!

Wild & Precious Moment

This is a photo of me working on my last painting, "One Wild & Precious Moment" taken by my oldest daughter, Amy as we hung out in the studio for a brief hour before taking her to the airport. Amy lives across the country from me and I rarely see her these days as she finishes her teaching degree in Kamloops, BC so this was indeed one of those precious moments.

I was keenly aware that Amy would be leaving again shortly. After having spent a glorious ten days traipsing across Italy with her, this was a beautiful gift to have her resting on the couch while I returned to my "ordinary" daily life in the studio. While the music of her ipod filled the studio, my body relaxed into the finishing touches of a painting that I felt was both successful and succinct in expressing my inward landscape of tumultuous and ephemeral joy. The title for the painting is inspired by Mary Oliver's delightful poem "Summer Day" where the act of attention is a form of prayer.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-- the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

The Ways of Water

An impromptu exhibition of some larger landscape pieces is now showing at the E.K. Voland Art Gallery in my St Henri studio building.

One Wild & Precious Moment / 72" x 48" / acrylic on canvas

The Red Line / 48" x 72" / acrylic on canvas

Undercurrents / 72" x 54" / oil on canvas

Stone Carvers / 60" x 40" / oil on canvas

Art Salon style exhibition and Market Place

This was one of the largest undertakings I have taken on in a long time. Organizing and producing an exhibition of over 60 artists as well as an opening night Art Marketplace is a daunting task when you begin.

However, the sold out opening night was well worth the effort!

Here's how it worked: Each of the participating Montreal ArtBomb artists donated one or more 8" x 8" artworks.

These artworks were then all wrapped and waiting at the door. The guests purchased $50 tickets which entitled them to one of the wrapped artworks as they arrived.

If you liked your artwork you could keep it and if you would prefer to trade it with another guest it was up to you to do so! All the artists were in attendance and you could meet the actual creator of your particular piece as well as see more of their work in the exhibition of over 170 artworks hung salon style, floor to ceiling in the E.K. Voland Art Gallery

The exhibition continues until April 24th at Complexe du Canal Lachine in Montreal (St Henri) 4710 rue St Ambroise open week days from 11am to 2pm.