The Seasons Sacred
Exhibit at The Martin Place, McKinney, Texas
Sept. 9-30, 2017
Work in a New Direction
The Seasons Sacred (above) is the second large scale painting on Yupo ™ which I’ve completed, and takes to the next level what I learned from painting The Four Seasons (Part A below).
While painting The Four Seasons, I listened to the corresponding movement from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, keeping a tight rein on the color palette of each season, and choosing appropriate forms from my garden to serve as masks and overlays. The Seasons Sacred also began with a color palette, this time based on the liturgical colors corresponding to the Christian calendar. Design motifs and symbols added to the development of a visual vocabulary that allowed me to paint the dialogue between Christian narrative and my theology.
We live in a material world, here and now; yet many of us are aware of the unseen, the Spirit, and the endless continuum of spiritual life. The cycle of liturgical seasons, from Advent to Christ the King Sunday, reminds me that intersecting our four dimensional existence is the spiritual realm, which I think has a much greater number of dimensions. The spiritual realm is here and now, weaving through what I see and understand, whether I acknowledge it or not. Yet who has not experienced a time when the awareness of the spiritual is strong and undeniable, as if the thin veil rips apart and the Divine breaks in?
I am very grateful to LC and Tommy Tobey for hosting the solo show at Arts on Granada (Ormand Beach, FL) in July that was the catalyst for the transition in my work from canvas to Yupo™, from acrylic to Plutonium™. I am grateful to the Martins for giving me the freedom to show this work, particularly The Seasons Sacred, here in McKinney. I am blessed to live in a community of colleagues and friends who have encouraged this new direction in my art, and who have lifted me up since my accident on the 17th of August. You all are God’s gift to me, and The Seasons Sacred is finished and installed because of you.