My new paintings, drawings and monotypes will be shown at Smith & Vallee Gallery, Edison (WA), during August 2019 along with work by sculptor Marceil Delacy. There will be an artist talk on Saturday, August 10 from 3:30-4:30 p.m. and an artists’ reception will follow. Here is my artist’s statement:
This new work focuses on the lines drawn between land and water, past and present, memory and intuition: my territory.
The “Visible Bones: Samish Flats Series” explores my emotional response to the landscape that I have lived within for most of my adult life: the brooding estuarine tidelands and farmland of the Skagit and Samish lowlands. The landscape here carries a powerful sense of time for me and serves as a daily reminder that we are living in only a dot on a vast, ancient continuum. I owe the title of this series to writer and naturalist Jack Nisbet, whose books explore the human and natural history of the Northwest. His friendship and writing have deeply influenced how I identify with my “place” and informed my work in ways I cannot adequately express.
The landscape paintings in this group explore the dynamic intersection of agricultural farmland and estuarine tidelands. The valley’s waterways – its threaded lines of rivers, ditches, drains and dikes – are the arteries that sustain living things, particularly recently cultivated ones. The acqua al mare – the routes of water to the sea –are complex. My painting has found inspiration in the writing of poet and farmer Jessica Gigot, who writes in her poem Tide Gates, “Opening, closing, regulating seawater. These rivers are not home to everyone. They only let in what they know.”
Speaking of lines: for several years, I have collected birds’ nests found within this landscape and am keenly interested in the energy, centrifugal force and gravity of these objects: they are three-dimension drawings in real life. They represent shelter, refuge and loss: so fragile yet so strong. One line at a time.
IN OTHER NEWS: I’m grateful to Smith & Vallee Gallery for exhibiting the work of their gallery artists, including my own, at the Seattle Art Fair August 1-3.
I will teach an INTRODUCTION TO MONOTYPE workshop in my Edison (WA) studio October 18-20, 2019. Studio fee of $325 includes all supplies and materials. For more information contact me.