Redtree Times

Botanica Unus— At the Principle Gallery

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.

― Gwendolyn Brooks

I enjoy painting these pieces from the Botanica series. The process for these paintings allow an immediate transmittal of their message while I am them. They seem to be about making marks that somehow delineate, in a very simple way, the tension between order and chaos. About how we seek strength and reinforcement in others to stave off the effects of chaos. About creating something of beauty in the face of chaos.

There’s something in these pieces that speaks to the polarity of life that has always found way into my thoughts. The polarity that is within us all.

Order and chaos. Calmness and uproar. Darkness and light. Good and evil.

These pieces represent the finding of balance, often by bonding with others to give them strength– and gain theirs– within that swirling chaos that we all face.

I like their simplicity and directness as well as the beauty and light I see in them.

Things we need in chaotic times.

That might be the only upside to living in dire times– creating beauty in our lives becomes a paramount act of survival.

As a passage from the novel The Painted Veil from W. Somerset Maugham points out:

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

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