New painting series.

New paintings in my gallery! For me, new groups of paintings don't always necessarily feel like a series, but these seven do. They all share an 'automatic' black brushstroke with accompanying haiku about the seemingly automatic things that happen in the natural world, especially in spring.

I've been reading a lot of poems by Jane Kenyon in the past month or so. She was born in Ann Arbor (where I live now), went to school here, and lived here until she met the poet Donald Hall and moved to his family’s ancestral home in New Hampshire to work and write poems.

She dealt with depression throughout her short life and was forthcoming about it in her poems. In the final words of her long poem, Having it Out With Melancholy, she describes the reprieve that nature can provide from the darkest depths, if even for a moment:

What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.

To me, the word 'unequivocal' gets at the essence of the matter here. For humans, it can be harder to access that feeling—seeing things clearly, without hesitation, fear, or doubt.

It does feel like flight.