I worked on this painting in 2024 in the fall. For a while I wasn’t sure how to finish it. So I had it up on my studio wall for a few months, hoping that it would resolve itself. I knew it needed something, but I wasn’t sure what. Today it came to me. I don’t even know how as I did not have studio time all day. But it came to me and right before I made dinner, I snuck in there and added the line of metal leaf. And it was done.
Today I saw the images from the fires happening out in Los Angeles and it is so horrific. And I am so far away and safe from the fires, but it just looks so terrible. I can’t imagine what it is like there. Or what it smells like, or how it feels to breathe in that burnt air, or to lose your home to the flames. Or to be a firefighter and running towards the walls of fire. The other week I saw photos from western North Carolina that a friend on FB posted that showed how people were still dealing with the damage from the hurricane a few months ago. I feel such a heavy grief seeing all these images.
There is a question that keeps swirling in my head these past few months that has become increasingly louder- what is the role of artists as we walk through this age of the anthropecene? If you don’t believe that human activity has and is contributing to the climate crisis, then you won’t think we are in the age of the anthropecene. But I do. How can I not? The increased frequency and the severity cannot be ignored.
How do we keep creating when things feel so heavy? I know that artists are always the messengers of their times. We see that over and over again, especially among people who have been marginalized. And so I know that people always find a way to sing their songs, write their poems, paint the images that speak to the times, and dance no matter how painful it may be or how heavy it feels.
When I first was thinking of a title for this piece a few weeks ago, I felt like the image spoke of portals- of a threshold between worlds. I thought of the Celtic idea of the veil, the space between our world and the Otherworld. I still am thinking of that, but tonight I am thinking of how we are perhaps walking in that space between the world that we know/knew and into an uncertain world.