About a Deer
Deer of All Lands: Dreaming, Watercolor, graphite and thread on paper and drafting film, 48" x 35" (52" x 38.5" framed)
Nature is clearly a big influence on my art. In my life, too. I love this time of year when windows can be open and the separation between inside and outside diminishes. It rained last night and, as I type this, the birds outside my open window are chatting and singing. The air smell like flowers, largely because our very fragrant mock orange bush is in bloom.
This month nature has been especially close, in beautiful and heavy ways.
Snapping turtles are currently nesting across the street and it’s a treat to watch their slow, prehistoric looking bodies lumber over land to find a spot to bury eggs. A few weeks ago a large doe came into our yard. It was either hurt or sick and died shortly thereafter, about fifteen feet from our house under the very mock orange bush now perfuming the yard. I spent the better part of a day trying to figure out how to get the body removed from our yard and seeing her large, still body every time I neared the kitchen windows.
She has remained on my mind ever since.
One of my bodies of work is called Deer of All Lands, based on an old book I found in a digital library archives. I recently rediscovered the piece in these photos, which I made a number of years ago and put in storage after it was exhibited several times. It’s one of my favorites, maybe because I spent countless hours on the stitching, and so I hung it in the gallery at the start of the season. There is a ring of deer, painted on the bottom layer of the piece, that I hope reveals itself slowly to the viewer, with time and looking. It reminds me that life is revolving.
Dreaming is also the title of my new painting series, created this past winter. It is a term that implies a different type of awareness, a knowing that comes through intuition and bubbles up from deep inside. It is a state that feels to me both real and not of this world.
Deer of All Lands, Dreaming, detail. The pattern was stitched by hand with three different colors of thread to create a shimmery gradation.
The mock orange bush mentioned above.
