Redtree Times

Flow– Coming to Principle Gallery, June

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower (1922)

My annual solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery opens in a little over a month, on Friday, June 12th. I have been in getting things together for the show in recent weeks, as I normally would though at a much slower pace. Still battling fatigue which requires that there be an almost equal amount of rest for any real effort made. This was to be expected after my recent radiation treatments so early in the year, the Principle Gallery and I decided that this year’s show would be a hybrid retrospective exhibit, a mix of new work and older work, covering the nearly thirty years my work has been showing there, as well as some representing my earliest work.

 I would prefer a show of only new work for this show, my 27th at the Principle. There’s something exciting about unveiling a group of new work. Sometimes it’s exciting like opening a wrapped Christmas present and sometimes it’s more like being handed the gun during a game of Russian Roulette. You never know.

But things being as they are, I am happy to put together this hybrid show. It’s been really interesting going through my older work and reexamining them with a newly critical eye. Fortunately, it’s gone pretty easily thus far.  The hard part is not in trying to determine which pieces fit into this show as I see it but rather which pieces I cannot include.

I believe that is because the title and theme for this year’s show is Flow. I wanted this show to show how the work has changed over the last thirty years but also how it has maintained a throughline in its identity and feeling.

A continuum.

A flow.

Like drops of water in a stream that moves forward and merges with and grows as it runs toward its place in the great waters of the earth.

I cross a small footbridge every morning while walking to the studio. It’s a runoff creek that dries up in the summer, much more often now than it did thirty years ago. But on those days when the creek is running, the thought that this humble trickle of water is destined to someday move through the Chesapeake Bay and merge with the Atlantic brings to mind the unity that makes up this world.

It seems small but contains greatness.

That’s how I would like to have this work come across, as part of the flow that sees small drops merging into a greater body.

I think the final lines from the poem at the top, Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower, sums it up beautifully:

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

These were, fittingly, the final lines of the final poem in his 1922 book, Sonnets to Orpheus. These lines spoke to me because when I began painting, I felt unheard in the world. Small and insignificant.  Each painting was a small droplet put out into the stream. Over the years, these droplets moved from stream to river, bay, and ocean, continually gaining momentum, proclaiming in its voice that comes from its humble origins in a tiny creek running through the wood: I flow, I am.

I flow, I am…