September 2007 Show
A Candle In the Night
181 Main Street
Brattleboro, Vermont
opening: 9/7 5:30-8

"Aurora" , 42 x 78, first hung on the wall like a physical door for awhile until I turned it horozontally, which is it's present position and one that reads more specifically about inner doors. The process of painting a larger canvas involves the whole body: one can't sit down with it but rather one has to move, engage, shuffle, step widely and dance with it. Perhaps "Aurora" is too easy a title based on color but the layers and layers and scraping and painting again have something to do with our daily comings and goings, our questions and mostly our unknowing. "Aurora", dawn, beginning again, maybe is the right title, a second chance, every day.

Two series have been threading their way onto canvas: the Janus paintings with the ubiquitous "door", the exit and entrance, and a second series called "Static In the Void". This painting, "Transmission", stradles the two and is another bridge painting, not leaving the previous series and not entirely embracing the next phase. What was curioius about the execution was that it was suddenly 'finished' and complete in a way that I put it up on the studio wall and have not taken it down since.

While painting "Threshold" a series of puzzles appeared. The shape and not shape, what was there and then not there but still burned through the color, led to the horizontal divisions. It was perhaps one of the more unconscious pieces in the last year; even the calligraphic markings, put in as scribbles but which came to have their own necessary place burned back through the layers. I love this painting best in the morning light when it literally glows but also love to watch it change with the day.

Rift 30"x30", acrylic

This painting from the end of spring, comes from watching the edge between light and dark, dawn and day and later, when I get back to the canvas, twilight and dusk; the colors grew from the weeks of chill and rain yet every plant was turning into its wakeful state despite the steady floods and scant sun. "Rift" seems to describe this sliding of seasons and the final break from the long winter.





New Morning
30"x30", acrylic and copper leaf on canvas

Summer brings a change of palette, a foreign one: green is seldom a color that I am drawn to- perhaps, here in this lush season with rains and sudden sun there is so much of the verdant shade that I inadvertantly rediscovered it.

For every baby, family or friend, a "baby quilt painting" is made-
this one for the most recent family member, Fen Hawkes deNiord.





Zazen, triptych
acrylic and gold leaf on wood
45"x 30"

Middle Path

acrylic and gold leaf on canvas

40"x 40"

Liz Hawkes deNiord


711 Bourbon Street: Blind Willy, Big Lips and Dancer
acrylic on paper, 12"x 14"

One of three images painted after a trip to New Orleans in 2003.


Dancing With Myself
acrylic on paper, 12"x14"

Tantra
acrylic on wood with gold leaf
30"x30"

Painting on wood provides a resistance to the palette knife and brush. A different pictures comes from this as the paint slides and stops in a slicker way. Often the surface is built up in multiple layers; ridges and dents catch the paint and lead the light to fall more sharply on the surface. A recent discipline is to stop after the initial few layers and then "take out" what I like most, to strip down to more esserntial parts of the painting. The biggest challenge is knowing when to stop.