Category Archives: Works on Wood Panel

Lost Friend: Northern White Rhino

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Acrylic and pastel on cradled birch panel (2023)

Size: w 18″ x h 24″ x d 1.5″

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, died 19 March 2018. His daughter and granddaughter, Najin and Fatu, are still living, but the subspecies is considered “functionally extinct” as it is no longer viable. I mourn the passing of this great creature with this painting and also the one posted in March (Leaving Eden) https://npaulartworks.com/2023/03/13/leaving-eden-nereids-and-the-northern-white-rhino/

Nereids in the Clouds (Day)

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Acrylic, ink, pastel, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)

Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″

This painting was inspired by the cloudscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe (especially Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965) and Kees van Dongen’s depiction of the ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Ida Rubinstein dancing Cléopâtre (1909). I see it hung paired with Nereids at Nightfall See Fire and Rain (my March 2022 post https://npaulartworks.com/2022/03/31/nereids-in-fire-and-rain/).

Setting

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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

Undaunted

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Acrylic, ink, water soluble crayon on tiles mounted on cradled birch panel (2021)

Size: w 16″ x h 12″ x d 2″

Just finished this piece for inclusion in a show of the same name, the annual OKWA (Organization of Kingston Women Artists) exhibit at the Window Gallery in Kingston, Canada for the month of October.

For a year and a half a herd of elephants has been migrating across southwest China, covering hundreds of miles – sometimes wandering through neighbourhoods or crossing city thoroughfares cleared of traffic by police monitoring their progress.  No-one knows why they left the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in March 2020, but diminishing habitat would have been a factor.  Perhaps then they got lost and just kept going.  Only now are they almost home again.

The mystery of the venture combined with the roaming herd’s determination and stamina has fascinated people around the world these many long pandemic months.  We have been captivated by the soulful, at times playful, creatures and taken inspiration from their quest.  In the words of a young man hired to deliver corn and pineapples to the always hungry elephants, “it almost felt as if there was a holy aura around them.”