The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
–Maya Angelou
*****************
This is the title painting, Home+Land, for my next solo show which opens July 17 at the West End Gallery in Corning. It’s a pretty large painting at 36″ high by 48″ wide on canvas and one that fairly represents my feelings on how we are tied to the land, how we identify home with a sense of place. This is the theme for this show as well as for much of my work in general.
I have long equated the idea of home with the landscape, with how we are shaped by those places that we know from an early age. The rhythm, the shapes and the perspectives of the landscape that surrounds us becomes part of who we are , something that travels with us throughout our lives. Wherever we go, we look for similarities to that feeling of our home landscape.
It might be in the actual landforms or the way in which the vegetation interacts with the land and the structures of the homes there. It simply looks like home. Or it might be just in the way the light strikes the land or the rhythm and flow of movement within the landscape that create a level of comfort that equates to that feeling of home.
I know, for myself, that there have been places where I have been where the landscape has been so different from the hills and fields surrounding my original home yet I still feel a sense of being at home. And there are other places that, while similar in shape and having beauty and charms of their own, leave me uneasy and feeling out of place. And there are places in which I immediately feel out of place in an alien way, places to which I could never fully adapt. Definitely not at home.
I guess what I am trying to say is that home is a mix of feeling and place. It is that place where you feel as comfortable and satisfied in place as the Red Tree in the painting above.
Redtree Times 