This is the eighth in a series of posts taking you back through a history of my work, from its very realistic roots abstraction.
After painting The Dark Horse Series, I started to expand my field of vision, away from the llano and the horses, away from the front pastures. I cast my eyes, instead, to the land that backs up my property. I found, there, a wonderful, old, dirt road that was virtually never used. It became my personal hiking trail, my simple paradise. You’ve all seen photos of it before, but here it is anyway:
To the north of the road were open fields and pastureland.
Lined with old fences…
… and stone. That’s my dear boy, Bubba, who came out for walks with me sometimes.
To the south, the land grant and the canyon…
… the forest.
I spent untold hours walking this road, in silence so pure I heard ravens’ wings cutting through the air above me. There were many times and days that it seemed this was why I was guided to my particular piece of land. This is why I came to Truchas. It was here, in the depth of this old forest, high up on the mountainside, where I accepted that no one—no knight in shining amor—was coming to live my life for me. I was my own, to love and to cherish until death us do part. This is where and how I began a deep communion with the land, with place and finally, with myself.
There were days I felt so much, out on that land grant path, that I would sing into the silence, across the deep arroyos and into the canyon. It was my personal version of howling at the moon I think. I danced out there, too, to those rhythms that seemed to well up from my heart. And there were times I would simply laugh out loud, shaking my head in wonder, bent over at the waist or arms stretched out to the sky, in appreciation of the phenomenal gift being given and the discovery it was engendering .
This new exploration, naturally, moved me into another period of transition in my work. As I deepened, as my time on the land became an essential part of me, I started making paintings unlike anything I’d ever done before.
This painting is titled Sing.
This is Dance.
Here’s a cool shot by my good friend, Kevin Hulett, of me painting Dance.
Walk.
Laugh.
Love.
I was absolutely bursting with love even on the dark days—for place, for life, and, yes, even for myself. I felt more alive during this period, and in the moments of painting these pieces, than I remembered ever feeling before. True, this was the kind of euphoria we all feel when we are falling in love. I was falling in love and my work showed it.
Sometimes, as artists, we make one piece that doesn’t exactly fit with any other, that stands on its own. I think these are true transitions. Bluebirds, inspired by living with bluebirds for the first time in my life—little finch-sized blazes of cobalt blue lyrically looping and flitting across the marshland at the foot of my road—was one of these.
Then there was Black and Blue, perhaps my own version of Edvard Munch’s Scream, still one of my personal favorites.
The enigmatic Threshold Struggle followed, another of my favorites, an illustration of moving through struggle to the other side.
Apparent or not, these pieces were all born of the land. They capture a period of intense soul searching and growth that could only happen in the embrace of this place I had come to trust.
I believe individual pieces like these, the “stand-alones,” move us from where we’ve been to where we’re headed, without our ever seeing it. They scratch our itches. They present and answer our questions. They are necessary, I think, to an artist’s growth. They are our explorations that bring us home.
And, lo and behold, this stand-alone, Embracing the Unknown, brings me full circle back to the horses. Ahhhh, the recognizable peace of that.
All of these paintings helped to pave the way to the next series of horse paintings, a larger body of work that was born of my ongoing relationship with the horses, the land, and with myself. I’ll share those with you next.
Love to you all,
Jeane
