Four Hands Painting

TinyLetters and a Trojan Horse

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Trojan Horse

One good thing about a real painting is that it’s a gift, not a Trojan horse.   You can look at a good painting over and over.  It will still speak, still radiate, still suggest.  When the CDC asked to use this painting on the cover of a medical journal, it reminded me of the process of Four Hands Painting with Susan Cornelis.   It turns out I also did a blog about this particular piece.

When images spontaneously appear, it makes you believe that the image somehow has its own consciousness.  The image/idea wants to manifest itself, if not through you, then someone else, or more than one person, in the case of Four Hands Painting.  If images are living things, they come alive again when someone else sees them.   Apparently the Trojan Horse wants to canter again, this time in a medical metaphor.  I see the painting as a meditation on time.  What do you see in it?

I recently started a newsletter called Symbol Warehouse Paintbox through TinyLetter. The email is more like an old-style  snailmail letter, more intimate and newsy, and reveals more of my inner process and personal life.  I’m writing them about twice a month.  If you’re interested, go to this link: https://tinyletter.com/saltworkstudio.  You can read the letters in the archive and decide if you want more.

 

From Camino to Collaboration

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Four Hands Susan Suzanne
Four Hands Painting Exhibit Information and Facebook Invitation
Dear Friends,

This is a belated thank-you note for following me on my Camino  journey, both inner and outer. Many of you have asked how the Camino has changed me. I am just three months out of it now, and have resumed my art life. Events have “followed fast and followed faster,” as Edgar Allen Poe would say.

What changes are showing up at this point after the Camino?  I feel lighter and more complete with my life as it is.  I am more able to celebrate who I am, rather than mourning who or what I don’t have, or focusing overmuch on my mistakes.  This change seems subtle but profound.  I have created some new paintings, filled with gold leaf and gold light, that  may have emerged from the many gilded churches of Spain. Projects are coming to completion, including the Four Hands Painting collaboration with knockout artist and close friend Susan Cornelis.  Our show is called The Golden Thread– the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth.

It’s not all sweetness and light, though.  My world seems to be full of beautiful, artistic women who have contracted cancer.  If I were the kind of person who reads omens– and you know I am– I would say that life is issuing a kind of Carpe Diem announcement, a Tempus Fugit warning.   I remember the wonderful Franciscan chapel of Rome filled with little skulls and hourglasses of time flying by, made of browned bones mounted on sky-blue crypt walls.  Scott and I visited this crypt, and I was surprised at the beauty and delicacy of the art.  Part of my life feels like this.. a skull with butterfly wings.skull with wings

So what’s it to be?  Bliss or bones or golden thread,  skull or butterfly wings, or some delicate combination of all these?

I’m glad to be on the road with you again.    This time, the road is my life. Yours, Suzanne