Art, Nature & Belonging
an artist’s voice… to earth
My eyes, hands, and body are drawn to your beauty and your complexity. To you I belong. Your intelligence is embedded in multiple folds of mutuality… forms co-arising as the light hits your undulating and ragged curves. You identify me in ways beyond – I am embedded in your aliveness. My dependency on you is total. You shock me with everything you do, know, and are. There is tactility in this belonging, and awe, that scares, thrills, and comforts me; begs me rise. I am beside myself at this surgical loss of our naturally emerging beauty, of our diverse knowing, our intimate wild places. We exist within this delicate balance of coherence and vulnerability. It is not hostile. Let us notice these landscapes of living languages as they breathe us into being. They have names too. We are preciously intertwined, precariously interwoven… one body breathing.
'Movement flows' - Richmond Bay, CA, May 2023
'Egrets and landscape' - Richmond Bay, CA, 2021-2022
These acrylics on watercolour are impressions from a walk where egrets and herons gather and feed. You will notice that the colours become more blue, brown, and grey – this is because I saw that the egret is not separate from its environment; the San Francisco Bay. That landscape, with its washed up wood and branches, the grey mud that the birds forage in, the murky waters, blue sky and clouds, are all part of the egret, and the egret is an expression of its own landscape; they are one and the same. As I walk in that, I become part of the landscape’s story.
Focusing in; photographic impressions…
Focusing on what I see, and smell and hear – I listen for their sounds, the rhythms, the patterns and rituals, their focus. When I peer into the details of how things feel, and are, then I seek to capture that purposefulness of life in motion.
Blurring the lines…
In order to experience the journey backwards from manifested ‘form’ to the energetic impulses of that form, I play with exposure, and time. I seek to reassure my intimacy. We do not know something just by seeing it – there are many ways of knowing, and being known. I contemplate life becoming form – and why. Blurring the lines of what I see enables me to sink deeper into a shared vulnerability where I have to feel my way toward you. See through the representational, and you have the tenderness of life dancing with the liminal.
