A canal viewed from my hotel room window – Beijing sketch
I was lucky enough to accompany my Lady to Beijing this past November while she was there on business. A couple of Beijing sketches are the proof of that. It takes 12 timezones and 13 hours in the air to get to Beijing. Which actually means you land within minutes of takeoff but the next day when heading to Beijing. When coming home we landed within a few minutes of departure of the very same day –
there is a wellspring deep within me that will replenish itself continuously – a wellspring that raises up it’s own inexplicable yet significant gifts for me to try to clarify and express using innate talent and nurtured skill sets
The Neolithic misogyny that requires absolute power and control over women instead of attempting even a modicum of self control is a characteristic of the destructive, backwards Fundamentalist mindset that infects billions of people world wide.
I had an image of an Earth Mother type figure that acted as the central engine of life. A flow of light and energy and spirit that fills everything, guided by the organizing principal that seems to be what life is, weaving ever-more widely reaching possibilities out of the materials at hand and creating the wonders that we share in as living creatures.
I wasn’t sure just how a painting of this would come together, but I at least had an idea of what it would look like.
There has been a shift, somehow, in ages past that has resulted in this place I now stand. I sometimes wonder what is the real place I am standing in. Is my perspective limited in some way? Ought I shift my viewpoint in order to really see what is around me?
12 years ago I realized that I had to do something with my artistic ability. The press of kids and work had left me with no room or desire to pursue art. But I couldn’t leave it lying fallow any longer – I was not only short-changing myself but I was depriving my family as well. It is one thing to know that a possibility exists. It is something else to begin the long process of realizing the possibility. So I decided to start drawing. Drawing is the basic artistic skill that I wanted to develop as a first step to being able to express my artistic visions.
I’ve heard different times that people want to know the stories that the work acts as a window for . . . I wanted to sweep the sky into the earth, the surface into the depths, the ephemeral into the eternal. I wanted to play with the paint.
Many, many thousands of years ago there were vast lands that now lie beneath the oceans of our world. Before the collapse of the glaciers and the rise of the waters people had a long time to knit themselves into these places that we now only can visit in dreams or visions. The Boatman guides his craft on a surface that is now hundreds of feet deep beneath the waves and 15,000 years deep in our forgotten past.
I am participating yet again in the Bayview Art Tour. This is when I open up my house and the public is free to come in and see my work.
I am showing this upcoming long weekend in a booth at the historic Distillery District just east of Downtown Toronto. A free event in this very attractive and pedestrian friendly venue, the art show runs Saturday, Sunday and Monday August 4, 5 & 6. Officially the hours are 11 am to 6 pm each day. I’m guessing that there will be a little leeway in those times depending on crowd & weather. There are times people keep their booths open for the evening crowd.