ELEMENTALS

ELEMENTALS  (2016)

Acrylic paintings on canvas and board.

I am interested in the microcosm and the macrocosm. This corresponds to a favorite book that has been on the table in my studio since 1980: Heaven and Earth. It is the essence of abstraction in Nature. 

In my Tai Chi/Qi Gong practice, and as a Jin Shin Jyutsu Practitioner for the past 27 years, I work daily with Energy and Nature’s Elements: Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Wood as they exist in the Body/Mind/Spirit. Tai Chi is about how the energies keep shifting, changing, becoming. In the same way each individual painting in any row can be spotlighted or hide amongst the rest. 

Each row of these small paintings can represent one of the Elements or be a combination of many elements. There are so many possibilities! They can be re-arranged and all mixed up together creating different energies depending on the focus.

When I spent my summers in Chicago teaching at the Art Institute, I painted these small paintings because it was all the space I had to paint at the time. I had no purpose in mind. I just began to “play with the possibilities” of the interaction of the Elements. And then I put them away never thinking about the wooden frames which I had found in an alley. 

Years later I realized they went together: the paintings fit perfectly in the frames. I had painted 11 Fire paintings, 9 Earth paintings, 7 Water paintings, and 5 Air paintings as if they could be viewed from close-up microscopically, or from a great distance, telescopically. 

I saw that the frames could be displayed as a ziggurat, or individually, or could be presented vertically, diminishing in size or graduating in size.  Voila!  The “Elementals” was created just by being open to possibilities.