Desert Landscape

Moving through space and time in a new landscape makes my gypsy heart beat faster. Having recently returned from an inspiring trip through space and time in Cali I couldn't feel more nourished.

Joshua Tree National Park has been beckoning me for decades and when I heard that my friend and fellow painter, Theresa Passarello was going I couldn't resist meeting her there. Theresa picked me up at LAX and we headed straight for the desert. Once we were released from the endless traffic of LA we entered a landscape of rolling hills and spinning windmills with snow capped mountains in the distance. My blood was pumping. The thrill of a new vista is my favourite drug.

  

The Prairie Paintings (dedicated to my mother)

This November my mother, who has suffered from increasing dementia for the past several years, was hospitalized with aspiration pneumonia. Apparently this is a fairly common path in any degenerative disease and with this inability to swallow the downward spiral begins. 

Under Western Skies / 20" x 20"

Radiant Absence

Radiant Absence / 40" x 60" / acrylic on canvas / 2015

Upcoming Exhibition:  Radiant Absence

Galerie Espace
4844 Boul St Laurent
Montreal, QC

Vernissage: Thursday, March 31 / 5 to 7pm
Exhibition continues through to Sunday daily noon to 4pm
or by appointment.

The truth is I would rather not be exhibiting right now as I feel raw and vulnerable from the recent loss of my beloved Walt, however I am unable to cancel the show which was scheduled a year ago. That being said, a "radiant absence" fills my days and this show will be a reflection of this profound transition and transformation at work in my paintings and my heart.

New Plein Air Paintings Available

Several new paintings fresh off the easel from the Adirondacks in August

River Running / 16" x 20" 

Clouds of Flowers / 18" x 24"

Stay Weird / 18" x 24" 

Glacial Erratic / 18" x 24"

St Regis Canoe Input / 16" x 20"

Talking Trees / 20" x 16"

Squamish and The Chief

After a great visit and dinner with my cousin Shannon in Whistler we headed for Squamish. Fortunately for us  this is where

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.

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.

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.

An Adirondack Love Affair

I have spent most of the summer breathing in the beauty of the Adirondacks and falling more in love with the place every day. I have, painted and hiked and paddled and painted.

I continue to meet interesting and generous people everywhere I go. This year's painting culminated in a grand pop up gallery held in magnificent private home on Upper Saranac Lake. It is so rewarding to have a large body of work (40 paintings) installed in such a gorgeous home environment. This whole story began last July when I had a solo exhbition at View in Old Forge, a wonderful Arts Center with several well designed gallery spaces for exhibitons. I became an accidental artist-in-residence when a certain woman purchased the signature piece from my show. Marsha Stanley has written a delightful article about this experience from her perspective that was recently published in the Adirondack Almanac.

 

A beautiful preview cocktail party was held for the AdkAction.org board members as well as the board of the local Wild Center. Both of these places are dear to my heart and 20% of all sales were donated to AdkAction.org for the many wonderful projects they do in the area. I will be giving a talk at the Wild Center on Sept 8, 2014. The talk is entitled "The Wilderness Within" and will give a glimpse into the process of my own artwork as well as discuss the advantages of using social media as an isolated rural artist.

The pop up continued for another two days and many, many people dropped by. I sold eighteen paintings! The gallery curator from the prestigious resort next door called "The Point" came by and selected four paintings for their gallery as well. It was a tremendously successful experience for me on many levels.

It is a lot of work to do a pop up gallery but well worth the effort. The direct contact with the people who come to see and/or purchase my artwork creates new connections and friends that I value dearly. I will be returning this week-end to participate in the Plein Air Arts Festival organized by Artworks of Saranac Lake. I am looking forward to this event as there are so many incredible spots to paint in this sparkling part of the Adirondacks.

 Rock Portal / SOLD

Earth Bones / SOLD

Soul Floating in Cosmic Star Sky

This painting was inspired by two recent experiences, both were gifts from dear friends. The first one was described in the previous blog post about a moonlit arrival by boat on an island. The second was another experience of night and the sensation of my soul rushing out and up into the star filled sky.

Soul Floating in Cosmic Star Sky / 24" x 30" / acrylic on canvas

We decided around midnight to take a boat out into the middle of Upper Saranac Lake and float. It was the loons that lured us there with their shimmering calls across the dark water. No moon. No light at all when we turned off the boat lights. Darkness. Then we looked up and fell into a sky of stars. A swath of spilled milk filled with galaxies spread over the heavens from north to south. The Milky Way, dazzling in it's beauty, punctuated with the streak of a falling star every so often. We floated, the loons sang and I became the sky. The night is when we are most in touch with our intuition, when logic and reason step down and our instincts come alive.

What will we do when we have obliterated all the darkness from the planet? When we no longer can look up and see the stars? Will we forget them? Will we forget how tiny and insignificant our small and short existence is on this planet? Will we forget to be awed and humbled by gratitude. I pray that we remember to preserve the darkness and the stars for our grandchildren.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
~Albert Einstein

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

Earth Garden

A new painting that I have been returning to day after day as a sanctuary of peace. A hectic, active outward life is balanced by this eternal inner forest.

Painting from Inside the Roar of Autumn

This Autumn has been extended for me by traveling South and following the changing colors into New England. It has been a glorious time of replenishment for the senses. 

 I now look forward to a winter of hibernation in my Montreal studio where I will release all these images onto canvas!

 

Fire Forest / 48" x 36" / acrylic on canvas

Forest Incantation / 28" x 22" / acrylic on canvas

This is the Right Place

 

 There are certain geographical places on this spinning globe that resonate more strongly with each individual being than others. The Ausable River is one of those places for me.
The twisted roots embracing the rocks, the ancient rock cliffs, the deep dark pools and the roaring waterfalls all make me ecstatically happy when I am around them.

Ferocious Beauty

This spring after a yoga class I went and searched out the Lachine Rapids which I had never seen before. I had to walk through a bird sanctuary that was erupting with spring birdsong. There were photographers everywhere capturing the many different species singing their hearts out in the marshes leading up to the river. I heard and felt the river before I saw it. As it was early spring there were a few tender green buds on the trees but no leaves yet and the water was roaring! I sat on a rock by the rapids and felt a wellspring of gratitude bubble up from inside. Sitting in that spot of sunshine listening to the roar of the rapids, I felt thrilled to be alive in the moment. I love when life takes you by surprise and knocks the breath out of you with one of its endless forms of beauty!