Studio Thoughts

Last week I quickly wrote my blog and posted it.  My friend Joanne read it and said, "I think you misspelled a word in the title."  which I had indeed.  The corrected word was sow, as in planting, which is also the spelling for the word for a female pig: spelling in English is weird. I am not a good speller, never have been. I had written sew, which is a word, and is spelled correctly, but not the correct word for that particular sentence.  It felt right, but also wrong, and Joanne was  wonderfully helpful, and kept me from looking foolish. I started thinking though, for that piece sow was right, but sew could also be a meaningful idea coupled with peace. While it is nice to think of peace as a freestanding concept, it seems that it is more often applied as a solution for a dispute, a difference of thought and action which has caused strife; a division.   Sewing together the sides of a wound promotes quicker, cleaner healing, with minimal scarri...

When the world sows hatred and behaves badly, I seek the comfort of my studio.  In that special place I create my own world. There was a time I sought to express my own anger and rage in my imagery, but that time has passed.  I have realized the commonality of rage and its static qualities. These days I seek, as I did decades ago when I began to paint, images and sensations of a more profoundly eternal quality, the essence of which is calm, soothing peace. In the realm of the everyday I comfort myself with the love of friends and family, animals and nature.  In smaller ways, I relish the pleasure of hot coffee, favorite foods, fresh air and wild things in my yard. They all seem so miraculous. In the studio, I seek the broader space of timeless understanding, of the largeness of the universe, and the comfort of our human smallness in that universe.  Smallness give us freedom to make mistakes and the largeness of the universe gives us space to grow from them. ...