One day many years ago, my husband and I were in a book store, Raven Used Books in Northampton, and I came across Peter Brown’s On the Plains,  a magnificent book of large photographs, all taken in middle and western America, of grand landscapes and spacious skies. It’s become one of my favorite books to dream to. The sprawling scenes of immense horizons, for some reason, calm my mind and make me smile.

Throughout the years, I’ve looked at these pictures and thought of doing a series of landscapes, bringing together the beautiful simplicity of land and sky.

Finally, it is the end of 2011 and I have just started this series: Where Earth Meets Sky. The difference with these paintings will be the omission of wax. I don’t want the surface texture to take away from the piece. The sky has many layers of smoothed gesso and then treated in the end with a high gloss polymer. The grass, however is carved out of wet gesso and then dried, giving a little texture to the piece. Oils are used in layers of intense yellows and oranges with hints of brown and green.

The beginning is always filled with anticipation, a new start that will give way to intent and subtle emotions.   This is of course, if everything goes as planned. To get anywhere at all, I will have to remind myself to go to that place where judgment takes a back seat and adrenaline takes over, eager to devour a challenge and where starting a new canvas anchors itself.

Here are a few stages from sketch to finished product. Over the course of about three months I step back and forth, adding a little, adding a lot and sometimes nothing at all. Then, somehow it’s complete.

The past few summers have brought some enticing visitors to the corner of my home, where mint grows in abundance. Its leaves give great ground coverage and coolness to our reptilian friends as well as provide dragonfly nurseries. When the mint blooms, it lures tons of bees and flies. They absolutely love the stuff and can’t get enough of it. At points of the day there is a frenzy of insects going berserk over these itsy bitsy blossoms.

                                                                                                                  Toad’s home.

                                                                     Even during Hurricane Irene

before wax is boiled out

after wax is boiled out of fabric

Looking back to the year 2009, my sister asked me to create an image for a fund raising event called, Health Alliance for Sudan, that would be in the Valentine’s Day spirit  and also mimic the bright, colorful designs worn by the people of this fragile country. The heart was printed on Mr. Elllie Pooh paper as a card, raising money to buy much needed mattresses for the Juba Teaching Hospital, which  MedShare International helps supply with excellent medical equipment.

The design for this piece unfolded nicely for me, mainly because I knew before hand what I wanted to put into the body of the heart; x’s and o’s for kisses and hugs.

My first attempt resulted with this one which ended up on a tee shirt.

first trial after washing

basic design

final color version

“I worked on that tree for months. It was the saddest tree I’d ever known. Something about the way it responded to the chisel. Sometimes after six or eight hours alone with it, I’d just start crying. It seemed so lonely.”

“It must of had a hard life,” Orv said. ” Oaks are pretty strong. They can take a lot.”

“The Wolf at Twilight, An Indian Elder’s Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows by Kent Nerburn

After exploring batik on my own and studying it at school, the process of applying wax as a resist has been ingrained to the point that I do the same to my paintings. Especially with this piece, “tree”, as it’s being called for now, I used the wax as something I could remove later and have the color underneath show through. I’ll scrape off the wax in areas that I want to lighten up.

With this painting, I’m trying to flood the space with the limited light of sundown.  Being a warm glow, angled so that a gold ray shines through the trees, it presents a theme of past, a story told when the day is done. “Tree”, with its gnarly branches and exposed roots, has treasures of experience.  After a century of life, soaking up its surroundings, all with light and shadows, creatures going about their day and elemental sky over head, it has tales to tell.

“So, the tree you choose is important?” I asked.

“oh, yeah. You want trees with a good spirit.”

“how do you decide which trees to choose?”

Oh, I just kind of drive along until I get a feeling. Maybe I’ll see a tree and I’ll feel like it’s calling out to me. Cottonwood’s the best. That’s the sacred tree.

“The Wolf at Twilight, An Indian Elder’s Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows by Kent Nerburn

I think this one is close to being done, although, it may need more red and blue and more work on defining the roots. I added purple to the dark shadows to create a more balanced tone to the eye. The title to this piece hasn’t come to me yet… The subject is a tree that has seen many seasons and perhaps experienced ancient times with its twisted branches and gigantic roots coming out of the grass.

In my childhood, my family and I lived in a house that was as alive as we were. We called it the “Kelang House” after the town it stood in. Exerpt from Michele Andree’s, Like Minds post.

“It was my very first memory, walking up the driveway to the Kelang House just after it rained and seeing a tiny bright green snake climbing up a black tree trunk. I may have been two and as I recall it was the first day we moved into this home on top of a hill in the jungles of Malaysia. There was grandeur to the place, not just because of the wide open yard that circled around the house or long stone steps up to the front door, but that it was once occupied by the Japanese in World War II as their headquarters. It had its own personality filled with ghost stories. I remember the garden teaming with frogs, turtles, fireflies and the tallest grass that let us hide inside of it.  My brother and sister and I would spend all our time playing and acting out stories in this pulsating garden far away from everything.”

” While living five years in this home, we witnessed it decaying. Molds, mildew, rotting wood ceilings were evidence that the house was being swallowed up by the imminent jungle. Plant life crept in as well as lizards in abundance. These memories are what now appear as glorious times. They are clues as to how humans soak in their environment and how it remains with them as some sort of fuel for the fire, lasting until death. Remembering how I felt then, takes me right back to the things that are most meaningful in life.”

I remember my parents struggling as the house fell into disrepair over the years we made it our home. From the roof caving in, giving way to the weight of bats, to the human bones found under the house and the mounting feeling of being pushed out by spirits, was more than we could stomach. My father would love to tell the story of how he and my mother found the Kelang House by driving past it below the hill one day and looking up at it accidentally. When he approach the house for the first time, he told us that as he crossed the threshold, he had an overwhelming feeling of coming home.  Having  felt this way once before, he could only describe it as an experience of “knowing”, a lot like when he told us how he first met my mom and knew she was his wife. In the beginning it was a magical, stunning place, like a stately home overlooking the town below, and when our time was up, it let us know.

In college, one of my assignments was to tell a story through images on cloth using a color copier.  I rummaged through my parents collection of photo albums when at home one winter break and found a picture of Christmas morning, 1975? Probably one of the best Christmases ever, where I was given this tricycle with a back seat!  How I longed for that one.

The images read as a book with pages made of china silk sewn over a thin padding. Photos, which are heat transferred to the fabric, tell the tale of a house being consumed by itself. I remember a Yugoslavian girl in my class, as I presented this, saying rather angrily, “there are no such things as ghosts!” Feeling regrettable about defending myself, since I was worried of this kind of reaction in the first place, it was such relief  to find the rest of the class coming to my side, for each person had a ghost story to tell with an enthusiastic gleam in their eye.