So pleased that this painting, titled The butterfly, will be a part of the Ann Arbor Art Center’s 97th Annual All Media exhibit, which will be October 18-November 15, 2019.
It’s a special painting to me, representing a shift into a new area of exploration and expression.
The opening reception will be the evening of Friday, October 18…stop in if you can.
See The butterfly in its natural habitat…and in a frosted gold frame (a new option)!
A lot of things have happened in my life that I could never have predicted. Having two of my paintings hanging in a beautiful museum is one of them.
The 91st Michigan Contemporary Art Exhibition is up through November 13 at the Muskegon Museum of Art. It is a lovely show of 125 works from Michigan artists across the state. My paintings ‘Luck and Beauty’ and ‘Atoms and Ideas’ are hanging there now—I am honored to be included.
The opening night reception was a lot of fun…discovering the beauty in Muskegon and along the way there and back.
“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.” The poet Wendell Berry wrote this in his poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. I just learned about this poem a couple of weeks ago by chance. The entire poem is beautiful but this particular line means a lot to me. It’s in doing the things that have no clear end that I find the most comfort in and interest me the most.
This also describes my painting habit well. I rarely have the end in mind. It’s more interesting to see what appears. To build up, remove, think, destroy, start again—a time to free my mind and let go to what ‘won’t compute’. This painting was not trying to be figurative, but it felt that way in the end so those words followed. No plan, no pre-sketch, no set of steps to get there, but suddenly there is this thing that is beautiful to me with a sentiment that has meaning.
Later in Berry’s poem he says,
“Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.”
