Transmutations…

Lucky to say that I’ll start 2020 with a solo exhibition of 40 paintings: January 3-29 at the Village Theater in Canton, with an opening reception January 9, 7-9pm.

Please stop in if you can to see the new paintings and say hello. In conjunction with the exhibit, I will also be conducting a workshop on January 22, 6-8pm in the gallery space discussing how I approach my painting, specifically, combining poetry and painting, with a focus on haiku.

It’s been a busy year of sharing my work in exhibits and through my website. Meeting the people who purchased paintings and hearing why a specific painting was meaningful to them was the best part for me. It confirmed for me the power of creating and sharing—I think that this is what humans are best at. Certain images and words speak to us and stay with us as we go through life.

On the wall next to my painting table I have an eight-foot-long tackboard where I put up bits and pieces of interesting or meaningful things. Throughout 2019 it slowly built up with layers of mini paintings and textures, posters of songbirds and the constellations by month, strips of birch bark and dried maple tree seed pods. Last week I had the urge to take it all down, so I did.

With the end-of-year urge to sort, I was looking through a box of old paintings and collected images last night. Up on the tackboard this morning went a few treasured things to welcome the new year: a charcoal drawing my dad made decades ago of the Detroit River at night from Belle Isle with a sickle moon in the sky and a weeping willow probably still growing there to this day; an old pen drawing of mine of a bare-branched stand of spring trees; a quote from Wallace Stevens from a poem-a-day calendar I had in my 20s; a priceless (to me) 5 cent stamp with a portrait of Thoreau by Leonard Baskin on it; a Hiroshige print I never framed with a V of geese criss-crossing the moon; a copy I made in ink of a Ben Shahn painting of two brothers because I loved it so much; and a photo of some woods in the deep north of Michigan where I got lost one morning with my first dog.

These words and images are as familiar to me as my own hand, but pulling them out now and putting them on this wall they are mysteries to be unlocked again. Things, people, and experiences percolate inside us over the years, they turn in our consciousness, run in our dreams, and continually break out into new things. Henry David said, “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”