A group show curated by Anthony Waichulis which opens tonight ! October 10 and runs through November 1.
Two new paintings of mine will be featured and it is a personal and professional thrill to be included among the stable of realist artists from around the world. Both of these works were painted exclusively for this show and I had a freaky blast playing with the theme, Tight.
If you get a chance to see them in person please drop us a note as we wish we could be there for the festivities. Meanwhile…yours in flying brushes, Heather
“It’s easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” Leonardo DaVinci
Trustfall – The Series
It began with a fierce and mournful wailing in the heart. A visceral flailing of the soul. In the reaching out as sanity explodes the artist grabs instinctively for what is always within reach the sketchbook.
Thanksgiving Morning 5:45am – full dark
Waking to Trustfall
Eagle – fierce and powerful and the last true guardian… FURY.
Flag – Dramatically wrenched into fierce tension – tightened, knotted, twisted, threadbare – shredding – coming unwoven – just a few stars coming…UNSTITCHED. With eagle feather and red and white threads swirling all around. Then what IF anything is there to save it?
Later on the rainy Thanksgiving morning – with the library fire roaring and the tiny tree lit
Having watched as the dark sun rose and the cardinal slept late and the Jamestown sailed into heavy squalls with lightening during the midnight watch.
Found the eagle studio shots [from] 14 march 2011. Perfect for this painting. 32 x 48 panel ready to go. Ordered a “distressed” flag – which I will torture further in the pursuit of freedom.
3 April 2025
Panels up for oiling out. Re-energized. Resistance beginning to grow nationwide. Marches on the 5th. I’m ready to dig in and do this.
RISE UP
11 May 2025 – commences and between 4.00am and 5.00am
Panel up on the easel. Flag drying on clothesline. Fist ready to fight.
Artist’s Post Scriptum This is how it began. As it became clear that there was more to be said the resistance grew into a triptych. Two additional smaller works flanking the eagle. Taken together the creative response flows from the kernel of that fierce flailing soul grabbing for the powerful truths of beauty, decency and justice standing together with the voices of Resistance and holding on tight.
The second painting in the Trustfall Triptych. You can read the Painter’s Notes for Trustfall – Resistance for the backstory.
This began life as a smaller study last year when the idea of Trustfall was first percolating with the Muses.
The powerful emotions of trust and fear incongruently balanced with the lightness and whimsy of bubbles.
A dynamic that continues to challenge and somehow comfort.
The third painting in the Trustfall Triptych. You can read the Painter’s Notes for Trustfall – Resistance for the backstory.
The Muses don’t hold on to grudges and can’t abide living in hate they see beauty everywhere and insist on catching it like feathers riding on an ocean breeze they love to grab this old artists’ hands throw caution and brushes to the wind and dance.
AND…
Because I knew you would ask… a map rendered according to distant memory and assistance from my book of feathers so you can make sense out of these treasures.
The first comes alive as the fishermen rising with the tide load gear and guts and head out to sea.
And then just before sunset when their boats are all tucked in for the night the light softens colors are warmer edges shimmer and humans gather to bear witness.
In Menemsha they arrive in groups with chairs and coolers and children in tow and settle along the sandy beach to celebrate the day’s passage.
We are there too between the pilons out on Dutcher’s Dock but with the ocean behind us looking back on sleeping boats and empty fishing shacks shadowy porches and whispering neighbors.
Maggie and I had been wandering around the little town for most of the afternoon. Jane gave us both a refreshing cup of water. Then we walked out along the dock stopping outside of Larsen’s to chat for a spell with Paul and his pup. And gradually, as the crowds began to gather to watch the sun go to bed we made our way further out.
Boats coming in sun going out seabirds singing water becalmed there was magic in that gold.
It wasn’t until I returned to the landlocked studio and scrolled through my reference photos that I zoomed way in to see Paul and companion heading home up their little hill and seeing that furry deckhand readying to tie up and remembering my own trusty apprentice who had been waiting patiently for the Muses to let her artiste be done for the night…
well… getting to paint those kind of moments are what it’s all about.
“Bring tea for the Tillerman Steak for the sun Wine for the women who made the rain come Seagulls sing your hearts away ‘Cause while the sinners sin, the children play
Oh Lord how they play and play For that happy day, for that happy day” Cat Stevens (Yusif Islam)
The painting came through way before the title.
When months ago, as the sketchbook notes remember for me, I was reaching about in the studio for my touchstones, my eye settled across the room and over to the corner cupboard, home for many a maritime relic.
This wheel, this tiny helm, came to me by way of Jane Slater’s Menemsha shop many years back now. It would barely fit on a fish platter and it is deceptively heavy. The turned wooden handles earned their scars long before coming to rest in my studio. Rugged stalwart hardworking circles within circles.
I set it next to the easel and waited for the Muses to speak. But while they argued the tension itself was what I was listening to…
Tethering rope pulling hard to starboard onward onward ever onward.
Delicate teacup poised with the confident compassion of Slowdown, holdfast…we’ve got this.
But of course it isn’t about the wheel, or the teacup or the rope. It’s about where the boat takes us.
This was Maggie’s favorite painting. If you know, you know.
Pea season was outstanding this year. A long slow spring with plenty of rain.
I want to take you behind the scenes a bit. Out with me into that spring garden…
You can see what sort of jungle we were playing in… This was the snow pea tower which was on the cusp of its harvest.
Across the walkway were the bush peas which you will recognize as the backdrop for this painting.
Both Maggie and Herself were insistent that I NOT spend the entire year trying to paint EVERY…SINGLE…PEA.
The Muses fought them off…at first.
Even with the heavily selective editing which was designed to create a lacework screen to reveal the ocean beyond it took me weeks and weeks and weeks to render pod and leaf as honestly as I grew them.
The crisping of early winter mornings forms wispy tendrils of delicate steam which float above the teacup sitting on a wooden box to the left of my reading chair in the snug of the studio library.
It is often a place and a time of year where and when I go a little deeper and darker under the sway of Under Milk Wood.
Last November while walking those Welsh worn cobblestones I had two companions.
On my shoulder to the left were the well thumbed pages of Dame Hillary Mantel’s Cromwell saga and leaning just there on the bones of the right Franny Moyles’ weighty tome of a biography of Hans Holbein, the younger… of course.
Magnificent chroniclers of juicy details all three authors taken as one provided a playground for this pondering artiste while the Muses plucked their gossiping lute strings stirred up lessons from the lives of the great poisoners and ground pestles of earthy cadmium fire and indigo mystery.
Over my leftmost shoulder just beyond the peat bog stained shelving its Trinity alphabet leafed in gold hiding a scintillating glint winking from atop the leaning pole of mace tucked there into the darkly columned corner…
just there gesturing away from all that history toward the promise of of a canvas garden coat draped over the rim of the sour cherry scarred bucket reflecting the raking of the earliest morning light then flinging us out and beyond to the white stone guards of the churning ocean horizon…
stood that stalwart maid of the chamber Her-story ivory aproned and bible black.
Touchstones … ” : a test or criterion for determining the quality or genuineness of a thing ” (merriam webster dictionary)
From my sketchbook,
7 October 2024
heavy fog and dew 7am with some color in the foliage the hickories are this weeks’ show stoppers but the edges of everything are become brittle.
Talismen – Touchstone groping for guidance – for reassurance chased by fear popping up around unexpected corners and in between dreams which warp relentlessly from problem solving and revisiting childhood houses into nightmares battling with mutating monsters all of whom start out as benevolent strangers.
In the thick and soul clenching morning blanket of fog I reach for my talimans the objects which I have within reach in every corner of this studio imbued with meaning only I can treasure afraid they may lose some of their power if revealed or that I will in the telling.
Organic – dynamic – keepers of the story do I dare let them tell their own.
15 Nov
This feels right – and strong and deeply authentic when in doubt – go home
Meeting the Muses where they are and leaning in
Perfect November day cloud cover newly bared branches
OK now a better approach light and moonlit
TALISWOMEN TALISWOMAN TALISMAN
Painter’s Notes Post Scriptum –
Unable to land on the best use of the “working title” of Talismen/women ? The objects surrounding and influencing the creative sphere are contributions from every corner and gender along the path. So, I referred back to these original sketchbook notations for some clarity and it would seem that the Muses had worked that out from the very start…Touchstones.
The little quotation taped to the bookshelf was attributed to Leonardo DaVinci as the last words he wrote, “perche la minestra de fredda”…loosely interpreted as, “Whatever, the soup is getting cold.”
