January 2, 2016
The studio is different, this second day of 2016.
It’s taking some time for the subtle but undeniably permanent changes to sink in. Some can be identified now; the bell paintings I began in December ring at a new frequency – thirty-six hours from now they will finish in a way I hadn’t imagined. There’s a kind of inner ‘glow’ to them – as though they were still in active process of becoming while I was elsewhere attending to christmas gatherings, encountering and engaging family; playing like someone 5 years old and far wiser with dear dear friends; making and sharing beautiful communal music; solving puzzles; sorting buttons by colour and size; breathing the outside air, forgetting worry.
These bell paintings are more fully themselves – I won’t need to work so hard to bring them home.
It’s impossible to get the yellows right in this photo – I’m not a good photographer & certainly don’t understand enough tech to make it right. The actual painting I stare at on the wall is like sunlight. It puts me into a hammock on a hot summer day that is made bearable by a perfect, sun-quenched breeze. I can hear honeybees, cicadas, crickets, red-winged blackbirds, the caterpillar beside me, who chews an ash leaf. A crow comments, occasionally.
There’s more room in here, impossibly.
How…? I’ve not moved anything out except – oh ya. The Bell paintings already at the Bean Cellar, and two hanging in living rooms. Paintings that are finished take up a great deal of space and need to move on to some other wall, somewhere else. I’d forgotten how strong they were.
None of my camera batteries have juice left. I find patience, while they recharge and catch up with my curiosity.
step 5 – I’d give you step 7 but my camera batteries…. What I’m looking at is more like a golden thought than this earlier one. Somehow the little bells ring inside a warm memory of change from long ago. Every colour is there- golden, rich red, deep violet, spring green, hemlock green, deep aqua loke Georgian Bay.
While I wait for camera batteries I listen, and realize that a new set of materials call to me for the first time in many years. Paper. Ink. Plaster. Chalk. – these will be a re-visiting, since that’s where I started long ago. Pencil crayon, after seeing a drawing at the Durham Art Gallery that stole my heart in December (it now astonishes me in my kitchen, as it did when I unwrapped it at Christmas).
I feel I want to make use of Black for the first time since rejecting it’s place in my work 30 years ago. It is the absence of colour.
Why black? Now? That’s a curious thing.
I follow the call to new media. Like a wise 5-year-old engaging in serious play. Hours go by, and no time at all – like a good walk in the forest.
Happy 2016, everyone. It feels new and full of promise to me. You too?