Hello,
How are each of you?
Last week I sent a bit of a mystery with my 3-2-1 format of three colors, 2 words, 1 question. This week I'd like to fill in the details!
Verdant green:
Verdant green. This color is showing up in my paintings. It leaps into them just as naturally as it grows and multiplies outside my studio door. There is no restraint and hard scrabble existence of the foliage I knew in Colorado. Gone are plants with spare elegance, proud to have survived with so little water. No, every form of green is abundant, lush, growing without bounds. Turn away for a hot second and I find more, more and more green. It is a color that is teaching me as much as I am painting it.
Cerulean blue and paper white:
Just as green infiltrates my psyche, so too does water. In the above painting, I stake out a balance between the spare and restrained and the beauty of blue. The foundation of this painting is paper. Old vintage envelopes…ones that held Clyfford Still's show catalogs. One day at the museum, my boss was cleaning up the area and these were to be recycled. She gifted them to me. They are just envelopes, and yet they have a magic to them as well, a nod to the teacher I have learned so much from. A merging of story, letter writing, and the up-cycling of envelopes.
life line, memory
What is the physical terrain of our inner landscapes past, present, and future?
The two paintings below inspired the connection between life line and memory. The first is a painting I started in Denver. Last week I brought it out again and was surprised by the energy I found in turning the painting upside down and adding the one thin line from heel onward. I continued that line work in the fashion painting with boots. When I stepped back, I was shocked at the visceral reaction I had. A sense of myself moving from childhood to adulthood, being linked by a singular lifeline. These paintings evoked a feeling of standing in the middle of one continuous loop of time between my young self and adult self.
This is what has been happening in the studio! I also am working on a new website. I am so excited to launch it AND it is not ready yet! I am still working out some of the technical details, but hope to share it with you soon.
Until next Friday!
Be well, breathe, read, and make some art!
Jen