the desert Series

When I finished the Spring semester of teaching, I was eager to head into the studio, for pure looking and silence. I often  think about the time that I camped in the desert, the macro and micro levels of experience- the landscape, plants, the close palate, the stripped down feeling of it. I have not been there since September, but I was inspired to make small drawings as meditation, as exploration, as memory and hand work. For this series of 50 I used walnut oil and prussian blue water color. This series is available on etsy. Enjoy

rip rap and lichen

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

pool and needles

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

fish hooks

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

arch and drag

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

the blue of distance

"...we treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to aquire it, rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance. If you can look accrose the distance with out wanting to close it up, if you can own your own longing in the same way that you can own the beauty of that blue that you can never be possessed? For something of this longing will like the blue of distance, only be relocated, or assauged, by aquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them...

Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent "let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated" for Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives at the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them- your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps even to the near. After all we hardly know our own depths." R. Solnit