I’ve been working on this one for awhile – a crumpled paper surface, worked in graphite and acrylic paint. I had it to a point it was ‘done’ but not done – something about it wasn’t working.
Reworked it with more paint, laid down more graphite. Now I look at it and it
-shimmers-
…which feels right.
—
This is a bit of the artist talk I gave at Principia last month when I traveled for my recent art exhibit, describing the use of crumpled paper:
“We are living in a chaotic moment. Yet, when were we not?
I’ve spent all my adult life protesting, advocating, speaking out. 25 years on, things do not look better – they look much worse. And I feel a lot of sadness and frustration.
Yet—having curiosity about this chaos somehow reduces my despair. It creates a little space between the chaos and my feelings of it. That space introduces some quiet.
In this quiet, what I begin to hear and witness is that all this chaos represents the surfacing of a lot of collective unprocessed pain – repressed as a society for generations. While I long for justice, what we might need more is healing. Healing requires listening. Presence. Not just reaction.
So the crumpled paper invites a metaphor: these thousands of fragments, scarred into the surface. Each tended to with care.”
—
a fragment of a poem from me:
follow the scars
trace the creases
work with the wounds
and a little (awesome) poem by Li Po (701-762, a guy I would love to spend an evening with, beyond Eternity):
Mountain Revelry
To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,
We drained a hundred jugs of wine.
A splendid night it was . . . .
In the clear moonlight we were loath to go to bed,
But at last drunkenness overtook us;
And we laid ourselves down on the empty mountain,
The earth for pillow, and the great heaven for coverlet.
May we all have a friend we can drunkenly wallow in sorrow with, until we find wakefulness so delightful that it is another kind of sorrow for it to end as we succumb to sleep, while being held by the mountain, rock, moon, and sky.
