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The Thresholds of Our Lives
4/1/2024 6:43:18 PM
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Topics: Creating Beauty: A Watercolor Exhibition
In my watercolor paintings I have often situated a human figure in the beautiful vastness and grandeur of the landscape, especially in our home of forests, prairies and mountains.
I was grateful for the opportunity to explore this further with a group of fellow alumni of the U of A Extension Fine Arts program, in a watercolor exhibition Creating Beauty, June-April 2024 at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
I always gravitate toward emphasizing the beauty of light and dark, or in watercolor art, to paint the shadows in order to reveal the light. To consider the edges and turning points. We have plenty of thresholds to consider in the before-times and after-times of our lives, through losses and milestones, through wars and pandemics and our chaos of distraction. But day turns into night, night turns into day. In twilight, as color and light surrender to the dark there’s a moment of still beauty. Of stopping to reckon with our own thresholds.
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda writes:
If each day falls inside each night,
There exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.
We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light,
with patience.
Irish poet John O’Donohue gathered the words of Neruda and many of the world’s philosophers in his plea for humanity to recognize the vital importance of beauty’s embrace. His book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace was the first touchstone in the making of this exhibition.
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