Acrylic, Japanese paper, gold leaf on canvas (2020)
Size: w 28 x h 40 x d 1.75 inches
This piece is also known as Sea Change (Fall Rich and Strange) — June 2020 for the full image. That title still holds, but when I looked at the painting this morning the words came to me. The new title is dark, but perhaps letting out the dark allows the light to come in.
Acrylic and graphite on paper mounted on cradled birch panel (2020)
Size: w 13″ x h 18″ x d 1.5″
Last night I was thinking about the poet Louise Bogan (subject of my PhD thesis a while back). She and her husband renovated an old farmhouse in New York state in 1929. She loved that house. A year and a half later they were driving home from visiting his mother and could see over the horizon that their house was burning. She lost all her manuscripts.
The painting above is about the sun setting. The poem below is about climate change — not about Bogan’s experience — but the image in my head of her house burning, seen through her eyes, was the spark for it.
Bereft
____
When I left, the world was green
There was birdsong
There was life.
____
Left/Nothing
____
I came home to find my house on fire
I was not gone long
I had not gone far.
____
I dream of scorched earth
Coloured gesso, acrylic, graphite, ink on canvas (2022)
Size: w 14″ x h 20″ x d 1.5″
“Przewalski’s horse” is the only truly wild horse in existence. Other horses thought of as wild are in fact feral, according to The Smithsonian. For many years it was extinct in the wild, surviving only in zoos and field stations; its population was at long last successfully reintroduced in the 1990s to its native Mongolia where it is regarded as holy and known as the takhi (meaning spirit, worthy of worship). I picture the takhi roaming from room to room in Palladio’s Villa Poiana, lost between heaven and earth. The image arose from the confluence of two dreams I had 15 years apart, the most recent just a few weeks ago.
Acrylic, pastel, ink, Japanese paper on canvas (work in progress, 2022)
Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″
This painting began as a simple study of white clouds across a blue sky, with of course my two Nereid friends present leaping from one to the next. I decided it needed more colour, texture and complexity. The above detail is roughly 6″ x 4″, so I have a bit yet to do.
Acrylic and Japanese paper on canvas board (2021)
Size: w 24″ x h 18″
Acrylic and ink on canvas (2021)
Size: w 16″ x h 10″ x d 1.75″
Inspired by, and dedicated to, SJ by her AN.
Hippocampus: part of the brain associated with memory, thought to resemble a seahorse.
The starting point for this painting was an image of the hippocampus obtained by means of antibody staining by Thomas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman (2004), reproduced in Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. My sea dragon (barely discernible, certainly not recognizable, in any case upside down) inhabits an underwater garden of memory, dream and desire.
Acrylic, graphite on paper mounted on birch panel (2020)
Size: w 12″ x h 16″ x d 1.5″
Acrylic, graphite, pastel on wooden panel
Size: 6 inches in diamater
This piece is one of three of mine on exhibit recently at In the Round V (Graven Feather Studio) in Toronto last month (https://gravenfeather.ca/pages/in-the-round-v).
npaulartworks 