In the surreal “mid-pandemic” days I started a series of paintings.
At the time I was reading a Rebecca Solnit book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. I adore the irony in the title. It was the read I needed as the world was spinning into the unknown. I underlined so many of Solnit’s beautiful phrases. One of my favorites being “when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
About half way through the book, in a chapter that began with Spanish explorers in the 1500s getting “lost” for years in what is now known as America. Then ends with a visit to a butterfly garden. Solnit contemplates the decay in metamorphosis and writes of “the strange resonant word instar.”
It’s rare for this to happen but at the time the word “instar” leaped off the page and into my imagination. I thought if and when I ever finish these painting I know they will be called “instar.”
It’s a word used in biology to describe the state between molts in the life of a butterfly. I like that idea very much but it’s this last line of the chapter I was telling you about that really struck me.
“Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.”
When I started the paintings each piece seemed to flow out so easily.
I just dove in. Intuitive from beginning to end. Or so I imagined. Finding “the end” for these artworks is proving to be illusive.
I lose the thread. Untangle it. Follow it for months. Then lost it completely again in the grief of my parents illnesses and deaths. Like “getting lost.” No longer being one thing…
yet…
not yet…
being found.
At the moment it’s pulled me back in.
I’m feeling pretty sure art making and all of life might just be a really long instar
On a good day, I like to imagine it as the “magical middle” where anything is possible. On a crumby day as the “messy middle” where everything needs to be cleaned up.
Like Solnit says… “perhaps change is like that.”
These are wild uncertain days. A heart in grief. A polarized country. A climate shifting. I’ve found the idea of Instar and the thought of “being rich in loss” comforting & hope you do too.
ps…
I’m skipping the Open Studio Tour again this year. The grief of my parents’ deaths is slowly shifting but I’m not ready yet to be in art showing mode. I don’t know who said “grief is not just the echo of love but the aftershock of meaning.” To absorb an aftershock takes so much time and that is what I need. I’m so very thankful for your interest in my art and hope that when the tides shift I’ll see you all again.Wishing all the very best to all the artists sharing their work this year.
Be well.
