Dear interweb world humans, beings, friends, voyeurs, and artists,

Thanks for following me all these years!  It has been a journey reflective of my inner world, a composition of shadow and light, beauty and imperfection.

 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I have to break through an invisible membrane of fear every time. As an introvert, sometimes I don’t even enjoy posting carefully edited versions of my life and paintings.  I’ve constantly struggled to be “authentic” with the innately inauthentic medium of social media and blogging.  At times I have been both over and under-attached to your reactions,  first living for them– the fabled “stats”– and then rejecting them entirely.

 

I think the high point of authenticity for me is, ironically, not the art blog, but the Camino de Santiago pilgrim  posts.  I really perceived the blog, during the time of being on the road, as a tentacle of true connection.  I could feel support reaching through it.  The art, if you can call it that, was completely unrevised– the messy notebook pages.

Looking forward, I find myself increasingly interested in pure abstraction and an authentic gesture.  I want distance from approval and marketing and time to develop on my own without outside pressure, time to grow a new set of metaphors. So I’ve decided to take 2016 as a learning year, not showing year.

I won’t be doing open studios, except for our local events. I am going to paint at the Art and Soul Retreat in Portland this March.  These 5 days in a hotel room, painting and sketching, should be fun and instructive.  I’m excited to finally be studying with Jesse Reno.  I think he is a master of staying with the process until the final image, however eccentric, emerges.  I hope to focus on composition with Jane Davies.  I’m looking forward to cooking on the hotel room iron! (Just kidding. Sort of.)  I will be in the Sheraton Airport Hotel, car-free, and am thinking about how to keep costs  low.  It will be a rather fancy art  garret.  I’m bringing plastic sheeting so I can paint in the room if I want, storing the paintings on the extra bed.Let me know if you have ideas for hotel room survival.

At home, projects include new chicks in March, and planters for the heritage grapevines we got as starts from the UC Davis plant ark. The grapes are no longer grown in France,  having been hybridized, but  they are the ones that appear in many old masterpieces.  An ancient strain has been preserved and will grow on our arbor, or so we hope.  The grapes themselves are perhaps these that Monet painted, pale green with a rosy cast.

Both chicks and grapes grow fast once they start.  I wish you a surge of new growth as well in the Lunar New Year.

Suzanne