Art, Nature & Belonging
talking to earth… an artist’s voice
My heart, hands, and body are drawn to your storied beauty and your quiet complexity. My soul reveres you… to you I belong. Your mind is embedded in multiple folds of mutuality… forms co-arising as the light hits your bespoke edges… it has always been you.
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… it has always been you.
I am beside myself at this loud loss of our co-emerging beauty, our diverse knowing, the intimate wild places. We exist within this delicate balance of coherence and vulnerability. It is not hostile. 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.
How do I paint what I see when I am outdoors in nature?
'Egrets and landscape' - an artistic journey into Richmond Bay wildlife, CA, 2021/22
Come on a journey into the imagination, as it expands out into the beauty of the Bay, as I walk it. Come step by step, see how I transform this sensory walk into artistic form from walking – and sensing – to photographing and, finally, painting. There are stages of discovery and process, inviting the viewer to travel instinctually from the form they might first recognize as ‘bird’ or ‘grass’, and enter into the essence of the forms that are yet to become.
'Movement flows' - Richmond Bay, CA, May 2023
Focusing in; photographic impressions…
As I walk, focusing on what I see, and smell and hear – I am listening for their sounds, rhythms, patterns and rituals, what is their focus? Their relationship to time? When I peer into the details of how things feel, and are, then I seek to capture that purposefulness of life in motion… first in a photograph. Below is the landscape through which I wander, sometimes for hours, noticing what is around me, sensing its movement and flow.
Blurring the lines…
In order to experience the journey of life into form, I play with exposure, and time. I seek to reassure my intimacy. Sight is one dimension – there are many ways of knowing, and being known. I contemplate life becoming form – and why… what a journey it is. 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 through the liminal, into being.
Photographic impressions become painted realizations…
Now, these acrylics on watercolour are impressions from my walk, where egrets and herons gather, fish, and feed. You can see that the colours in the paintings include blues, browns, and greys – this is because the egret is not separate from its environment, the San Francisco Bay. This landscape; with its washed up wood and branches, the grey mud that the birds forage in, the murky waters, blue sky and grey clouds, are all part of the egret, and the egret is an expression of this landscape, one and the same – together. As I walk in that, with that, as that, I become part of this landscape’s story… my paintings a tactile appreciation of relationship, motion, aliveness, and becoming.
