I have a show coming up in a few weeks at a local gallery, and all of the work is going to be new. That’s part of the motivation to paint these days, but overall, there’s a shift and I am beginning to understand and explore the relationship between my painting, landscape design and love of food and herbal medicine. That intersection fascinates me. What do my color choices, composition and brushwork mean for the outdoor installations, and what do they reflect about my food and health choices? I wrote a while back about how I had just realized that they were connected – and it’s taken me another year to begin the exploration in earnest at least on canvas, paper and in the world outside of my mind.
All this became clearer with the painting I just finished of my garden. This is a space that has become entwined in my DNA – through its presence everyday in my life as I drink my coffee, harvest my okra, and sled down it’s staircases. It took me looking at it, and committing to marks on canvas, to realize that the way I am living and the way I am conceptualizing landscape is congruent with how and what I paint. In all my paintings I shoot for getting an understanding of the subject’s essence and finding some solid forms to tie it together – so that my vision has a framework that can be an entry point for the viewer and an organizing principle for myself. Being outside, examining the forms in front of me and interpreting them on the canvas with color and texture, I realized this landscape has the imprint of my creative vision – as I saw the lines of the beds, the walls and the trunks of the trees establish the framework for the painting. Once finished, the painting had the feel of this semi-mature space that I had been crafting for years now, and I was astounded as well as joyful that I could more fully embrace painting and art making as a critical expression of an overall vision.
