Meet me in the Garden
This is usually a monthly newsletter, but It's been a while since I posted. So much has been happening that it's been difficult to catch my breath and actually write about it.
Four of my Iteration paintings are currently on display in the windows at Avenue 12 Gallery in San Francisco, for their impromptu Virtual/Window #1 exhibition. Use this link to see the exhibition online (all galleries in San Francisco are currently closed for the Shelter in Place order).
One of my Non Sequitur paintings is up at the Women Rising exhibition at the Studio Gallery Annex. Although the gallery itself remains closed for the duration of the Shelter-in-Place order, all paintings can be viewed (and purchased) online.
Most recently, Emergence Magazine commissioned two paintings for Negative Love, by U.K. writer Daisy Hildyard. Daisy won the Somerset Maughan Award for her first novel, and is a 2013 National Book Award Honoree Her essay is about the interlacing ecological and human relationships that run through the empty spaces created by the pandemic, and you can read it, and see my paintings, here.
In 2017 I had almost no artwork to show anybody. If you had asked to see my paintings, I could have dug up a few scans from art school (where the originals were was anyone’s guess), but otherwise I had nothing. For the last few years I've been trying to build up a body of work, and now that I've done that—and proved to myself that I can turn out five or six paintings a month—a lot of my paintings are now for sale! Prices and sizes are now included in my website portfolio, so please email me if there is a painting you'd like to purchase.
Lastly, I have no plans to make any more prints at this time. There are still limited-edition giclée prints available at my print store. However, going forward I’d like the paintings I’ve been making recently to remain one of a kind.
It seems like the COVID-19 lockdown has created a strange set of extremes. Everyone seems either way too busy or bored out of their minds—lonely, or craving time alone. Regardless of our situation, and whether we are conscious of it or not, we are all walking a precarious fence between recklessness and obsessive caution. Walking that fence may be an impossible windfall of luck, or a leap of blind faith, but we need it there. It’s all we have between ourselves and the unknowable wilderness of probabilities.
Perhaps that's why I've been increasingly bewitched by gardens. On daily walks around my neighborhood, I find myself hunting for flowers growing in sheltered places: park borders, planting pots, front yards, lawns, flower beds. Cared for by human hands, yet autonomous, and thriving in the unusually fresh spring air of San Francisco.
Dragonfly x Water Lily x Anthurium (Brachytron pratense x Anthurium warocqueanum x Nymphaea elegans)
The above painting is the last of the Insect x Flower "Correlations”, and it combines three species that occupy different habitats. Nevertheless, they all seem suited to a hot, stormy future I imagined would herald a return to a Carboniferous-like climate—almost certainly without the company of the more fragile human species. The Flower Iterations I've been making since quarantine began to feel very different, not like harbingers of a new and hostile era, but like small beacons of hope and strength, quietly growing in the eerie silence of the city streets.
Amidst the mingled panic and tedium of the pandemic, perhaps gardens are the real sanctuary: an elegant compromise between safety and freedom. Flowers offer their pure company and ask nothing in return but a little quiet attendance. Their soft architecture is timeless but ephemeral, marking the hours of the daylight and the changing of the seasons.
Gardens help us keep still and patient, and mark time for us by their slow changes and regular needs. That’s where I plan to wait.