Silence and solitude seem to be the theme this week on the blog. Well, most weeks, I guess. Today, I am featuring a new painting that will be part of my Native Voice exhibit opening three weeks from today on June 5 at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria. It is a 24″ by 36″ canvas and is titled Solitude and Reverence.
It’s a painting that has really hung with me here in the studio, my gaze often going to it through the day as I work on other things. There’s a sense of fullness and completeness, a quality I can’t fully describe here, in it that pleases me, that makes me want to study it and absorb it a bit longer.
Perhaps it is because I feel that this painting is even more personal and self-referential, seeing myself as the Red Tree, isolated in the solitude of my work which is symbolized by the field rows between me and the houses and road in the foreground. It is a pleasant isolation, a voluntary withdrawal from the rest of the world.
I suppose I should say the world of man because there is no withdrawal from the world. In fact, there is a more intimate relationship with the natural world which brings about the reverence referred to in the title. I see it in this painting in the landscape spreading out in the distance and the radiating light and color of the sky which seems symbolic of the greater power and mystery of the natural world.
I sit here now and there is so much more I could write about this piece but it all seems so futile when I can just look at it, knowing everything in a glance that I could struggle for hours to say so poorly with words.
And maybe that is the message here– that we should simply shut up and take in the world in a reverent quietude.
I will do that now…
Redtree Times 