“Startling Truth” Series in Process
“I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.” — Terry Tempest Williams
The Edge of All We Know, 24 x 24 inch acrylic on canvas
The Not Yet Stars, 36 x 30 inch acrylic on canvas
Detail of Constance & Orion, 36 x 30 inch acrylic on canvas
I’m building a new series of paintings called “Startling Truth.” The title comes form Maya Angelou’s seminal poem “A Brave and Startling Truth”. I can’t wait to share these pieces with you! For now, I’d love to share some of my thoughts about the work.
My tendency as an artist and writer is to look at things through a creative microscope and to focus on the joy and grief of the day to day human experience. “Startling Truth” is my way of telescoping way out, of flipping the microscope and focusing on the macro. My question with this series is this: When we stand at the edge of all we know, listen for the untranslatable language of the cosmos, and peer into the unquenchable darkness, will we finally acknowledge that the possibility of our existence — that we lived at all — is miraculous? And who might we be, as people of earth, and how might we treat each other, if we could embody that startling truth in the powerful now?
“Startling Truth” is a form of active prayer and also an expression of profound appreciation for the most foundational fact of human existence: that we are made of star stuff. Songwriter and poet Joni Mitchell puts it beautifully, “we are stardust, we are golden”.
Last year, my Singularity series was in dialogue with the poetry of Marie Howe, the writings and work of Joanna Macy, and also Stephen hawking's black hole theory. This year, my focus is still on the cosmos and I am working in communion with the words of Terry Tempest Williams, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, and the astronomer and writer Rebecca Elson.
“Startling Truth” will be premiering this June at Royal Artisan Gallery in Baker City, Oregon and Cavu Cellars Winery in Walla Walla, Washington.
I can't wait to share more of this work with you! Make sure you're signed up for my newsletter for all the latest updates.
A NOTE ON TIMING:
This series hits the galleries on Wednesday, June 2nd
Patreon subscribers will receive early online access to the series sale on Friday, July 2nd and I’ll be including pieces that were not part of the gallery shows
Then all unsold pieces will be made available to the public on Monday, July 5th (my birthday!)
My guiding lights for “Startling Truth” is the poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death” by Rebecca Elson and Maya Angelou’s “A Brave and Startling Truth”. I’ll be sharing more images and some process videos from this series soon. In the meantime, I’ve recorded Rebecca Elson’s poem as an audio file below. Her work is speaking so much to me lately that I even dream about certain verses. (I’m sharing an audio file because I always feel so much more connected to folks when I can hear their voices. Maybe you feel the same?)
ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.