Flare: High Summer

I’m sure you know…

That feeling in the center of your chest. Scream it out. Or. Hold it like treasure. Managing that wild mystery of feeling both at once is enough wild work for a lifetime.

That beat in your heart. That flare at your core. It’s how you feel alive.

Flare, 8” x 10”, oil on board with copper edge

I never really know…

What is a painting about? But this little piece is a “Flare” for sure!

It’s holding all that summer wildflower color. Although on second glance it has the riot of reds and golds that is all Autumn.

Anyways….see what ya see! That’s what it’s all about!

I’ve edged it in copper. It’s a slow process. There is something soothing about it. Like meditation. I really love how it catches the light. But not so easy to catch in a photo.

Enjoy!

Letting it dry!

Siobhan Bedford, Phoenixville, PA

“Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things and trying to make life worth living, and I know I don’t have to believe in everything but I believe in that.”

— Nikita Gill

Summer wildflowers a gift from the ridiculous summer heat!

ps…I raised butterflies!

It was sort of an accident. I picked anise from the garden. Then it mixed with fate in a jar on my kitchen window sill. While washing the dishes…I noticed little green things wiggling. Then I named all 5. Then I got attached. So fascinating to see five charming caterpillars turn into five garden fairies.

It felt like a wink from the universe. & such perfect timing as I continue to work on the Instar series. Blog posts below

Instar: The strange resonant word

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.”

— Rebecca Solnit

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.

Work on Paper: box full of darkness

Box full of darkness.

On page 52 of Mary Oliver’s book Thirst is her poem “The Uses Of Sorrow.” 

The first time I heard of it was in a conversation with someone about depression. I remember it because the poem’s last line felt like a crack in an idea I didn’t know I was carrying around. 

The full poem is as follows…

Someone I loved once gave me.  

A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this, too, was a gift.

Actually, it was the last word…gift…that was doing the cracking. 

Sometimes, any idea that sorrow can be anything other than something to be endured…just seems like icing on a crap cake! If you know what I mean. Everything from pandemics, to pollution, to the never-ending disappointment called “politics” being all wrapped up in a bow…makes some primal part of me want to start screaming. And. Never stop.

Gratefully, some equally primal part of my 52 year old self has noticed that other things happen on this spinning planet. More and more I nod knowingly to the gift of darkness.

Look long under night skies and into the eyes of those who are tending painful endings. Beauty is out there on the far edges of great sorrow. It’s messy. But. It is. Never not there.

I’m trying to imagine that sorrow is a reflection. Like a mirror. Tilt it…this way and that…sorrow somehow shapeshifts….

Maybe into acceptance.

Maybe into meaning.

Maybe into art.

Maybe into a gift.

Just Maybe.

All this is not for the faint of heart. Getting it. Forgetting it.

Bouncing back and forth. Probably getting more and more cracks. My heart breaks.

It can take years. So the wise poetess tells me!

As an aside…

Mary Oliver makes this note under the poem’s title that says...

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem) 

Her poem literally came out of the physical reality of the darkness of sleep. Something about that makes it even more…MORE!

ps…

I just realized I had intended to write about the line A box full of darkness because it has become a thread of inspiration for this mixed media work on paper. Lot’s more on that for another time.

It could take years! Wink!

Till then here are some WIP snaps along the way.

Enjoy.

Infinite Instar: in every direction

Another piece from the Infinite Instar series.

I’ve been turning it in every direction. I’m searching for something in the chaos I just don’t know what. I’m not sure anybody really does. But…my sense is that it’s better to search than pretending in plans.

I’ve been in and out of this painting for years now. It has become so layered. So complicated. So intricate. Could be a metaphor for life? Then again everything is.

It keeps changing. In fact…just yesterday I worked on it again. Just haven’t taken the time to make a photo.

Yet!

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.”

— M.C. Escher