The landscape has always been mine for the taking. I feel grounded and alive in it, knowing my place there. I am an integral, but small, relational part of it.
I think that being a midwesterner has been a blessing. Experiencing all four seasons is a boon. Each one, don't you think, coincides with an era within one's life. Sure, there's the youth to old age continuum. But there are also the multiple losses of a lifetime, the mourning of them, and then eventually, the new growth and blooming of new ideas, relationships, and even facets of one's own psyche.
The land delights with color and texture. In my own work, I am deeply in love with color palettes, but also the physicality of materials that reveals life, and a work of art in its depth and complexity.
Over time, I've worked with glass casting, encaustic painting*, paper making, and pottery. These processes are gritty, and force an engagement with what is...... dirt, sand, grasses, rock.
Engaging with fire and water as natural, but channeled forces, mimics geology, evolution and the resultant beauty. Working with fire is alchemical and chancy, yielding a moment by moment adventure.
There is a certain amount of arranging that takes place. I suppose you could call it design, but it's this moment of glee that I work toward, when all the elements of what I'm doing come together into something new and evocative.
*Encaustic painting is painting with a molten mixture of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment on a wood matrix. Each successive layer of medium is burned into the last with heat. This process yields a surface that is pleasantly aromatic, lush, and sensuous.
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