The Artist's Path

Good friend, great poet-artist, fellow dreamer, and ongoing source of inspiration to me, Laurence Holden, now has a blog up and running, where you can see some of the wonderful poems he read at our recent gathering/show in Atlanta. He will also be reading next Friday up in Franklin at the Wilderness Society. I hope you can join us if you live nearby!

Here are the details for next week:

Up and down...

What I meant...

What I meant when I said orange days, was that this weekend and into this week, I wake up and look outside, and pretty much all I see is shades of orange. It's been truly magical. These are not particularly interesting photos, but I felt like sharing the mood of the woods around me. I hope you like the orange!




Right now, here in northeast Georgia, the Hickory trees (mine are Mockernut Hickory) are a remarkable deep golden orange. The Dogwood trees range from murky red to sharp, dark red, and I'm sorry I don't have any good Sourwood examples here - I have seen some amazing crimson Sourwoods this week and they've left me stunned. I know I have never seen them quite that color before.

Orange days...

Marking...

I wrote this up for the show last weekend. Forgot that it might be nice to share here, too. It's the story of how I came up with my most recent signature for these new works.

Making a Mark

Dream February 6, 2009

I am given a small block of wood with a wood burner resting on it - in order that I can put a special mark on a piece of art I have created. The man who gave me this tool hands me a very old Tibetan print with a special red color and points to the red (which is the same as the red I have been using in my paintings). The mark is only about a half inch in size. This is an ancient tool to make an ancient and very special mark. This tool is ancient and Tibetan - it must be several thousand years old.

After this dream, I knew that I would use a wood burner to make my sign on my recent artworks that are primarily on wood. I was not sure what my mark would be, but that would come.

Then, a few weeks before this show, I had another message from a dream:

Dream September 5, 2009

I see large paintings or images of forests, water, etc. Superimposed on them are concentric red circles - sort of like targets. They could be successful artworks - large paintings. I woke up remembering this for later. I moved on to other dreams, and in those dreams reminded myself to remember this important image.

I awoke the next morning feeling appreciative that I had received a message, but also thinking that the image was a bit heavy handed for me, in terms of art content. I just couldn’t see myself plastering such a big symbol all over my work. I sketched it out, though, and thought about what the symbol could mean in the context of my life, and rested on the idea of frequency. I had been thinking a lot over the last couple of years about frequency and how we resonate to certain things and people – and with colors and sounds and places. Not only that, but this symbol also suggested to me the small stone that makes a ripple which travels far. These felt better to me, but still I wasn’t sure what I would do with the image from the dream in waking life.

A couple weeks later, preparing for this show, I borrowed a wood-burning tool from my mother that she had gotten for the grandkids to use. I wondered what my sign would be. When I got the box with the wood-burner to my studio and opened it up, I found several generic points in addition to the wedge point, which was the only one I’d ever used before. One of these was the concentric circles I had seen in my dream. I was so relieved to discover that not only would I not have to make big targets on my work, but even more because I knew what mark I needed to make. I would never have chosen that point with which to make my mark - but that my dream had informed me just in time.

This is one of many stories about how dreams, when I pay attention, can guide me in beautiful, strange ways.

words...

I was just opening a text document, and the one that opened wasn't the one I was looking for. It was these words I wrote back in July and apparently promptly forgot about. I suppose they were written for one or more of the recent paintings. Maybe I'll post a couple possible candidates with the words...



the river flows
threads drift on the surface
what lies beneath
who knows
the river carries on
and carries with it
all things within
going down
toward the sea
all things answering
gravity’s pull
fighting or flowing
in the current
all things answer
gravity’s pull
and the river flows on
to the sea

hw july 14, 2009

Thanks...

Many thanks to Brooks and Mo and Laurence for a wonderful show in Atlanta - also thanks to Rob for helping with some of the prep work...