Some artists are observers; others reach into the collective unconscious and search for something like a half-remembered dream.
A little dreamscape painted for my first solo show.
The word for this Illustration Friday reminded me of a this little tondo I painted one night some ten years ago. It’s hard to read the text on this image, but it contains a quote from one of my favourite poems by Walt Whitman.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contain’d.
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
I am still working on last week’s Illustration Friday word “depth”, but you can see the work in progress here.
When I was ten years old, I first picked up and read Alex Haley’s landmark novel Roots from cover to cover, almost in a single sitting. It had a profound impact on the way I saw and experienced the world for the rest of my life. In it, I would also come to see reflected the history of women and people everywhere: a story of pain, loss, struggle, determination, strength and liberation.
This image is a detail from During the Storm, painted a couple of years ago.