Waters Abundance: Seeing It All Come Together

There is a strange and wonderful moment that happens when a body of work leaves the studio.

For months, Waters Abundance existed in pieces with paintings leaning against walls, ideas being worked out, surfaces being built up and sanded back, colors changing, images appearing and disappearing. I was so close to the work that sometimes it was difficult to see it as a whole.

Video: Waters Abundance Show

And then suddenly, there it was.

On the walls of West Winds Gallery in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Seeing the paintings together for the first time was surprisingly emotional. What had begun months ago as an exploration of water had become something larger than I originally imagined.

Water became a way of thinking about abundance.

Not abundance as excess, but as something quieter… the abundance that is already around us if we are paying attention. Water moving through a landscape. A bird standing silently at the shoreline. Moonlight reflected across a surface. The suggestion of something beneath the water. Layers of earth, history, memory and time.

These are the things I find myself returning to again and again in my work.

I am interested in those moments when the ordinary world suddenly feels sacred.

The Making of Waters Abundance

This collection grew slowly.

My paintings are built through layers of acrylic paint, plaster, collage, drawing, metallic leaf, sanding and glazing. I often add something only to partially remove it later. Marks disappear beneath other marks. Fragments remain.

I like the feeling that the painting has a history and that perhaps we are discovering it rather than looking at something newly made.

As Waters Abundance developed, certain images kept finding their way into the work: herons, fish, maps, botanical fragments, moons, ancient-looking marks and suggestions of navigation.

Water connected all of them.

But I wasn’t particularly interested in painting water literally. I wanted to paint the feeling of water, the stillness, movement, reflection and mystery of it.

Perhaps most of all, I wanted to create places where the viewer could stop for a moment.

The Opening

The opening at West Winds Gallery was filled with conversation, music, demonstrations and people moving through the work.

One of my favorite moments came while I was talking with a woman about a painting called Blue Heron.

We discovered that we shared a love for these extraordinary birds.

I told her that the painting was about a particular kind of moment I have experienced many times: walking quietly near the water and suddenly seeing a lone great blue heron standing along the shore.

It hasn’t seen you.

And for some reason, you stop.

For just a moment there is nothing to do, nothing to accomplish and nowhere else to be.

You simply witness.

I told her that I think of those moments as gifts from the great Creator. For an instant, we become witnesses to something larger than ourselves.

I am the witness of the divine.

When I finished telling her the story, she looked at the painting and said she would take it.

Blue Heron had found its home.

That experience reminded me of something important about making art.

The story matters.

Not because a viewer needs to understand exactly what I was thinking when I made a painting. In fact, I hope they bring their own memories and experiences to it.

But sharing why I made something can open a door.

Sometimes the person standing in front of the painting recognizes something of their own life on the other side.

Being the Witness

As I stood in the gallery surrounded by this body of work, I realized that Waters Abundance is ultimately about something I have been exploring for a very long time.

Witnessing.

We move through our lives so quickly. Seasons change. Families grow. Landscapes change. People arrive and leave. Water passes beneath us and continues downstream.

And every once in a while, something makes us stop.

A bird.

A reflection.

A shaft of light.

A person we love.

A painting.

For just a moment, we notice that we are here.

Perhaps that is what I am trying to capture in these paintings, not the thing itself, but that brief experience of recognition.

The evidence of a spiritual presence.

The quiet majesty of existence.

And the extraordinary privilege of being here to witness it.

Waters Abundance is on view at West Winds Gallery in Grand Junction, Colorado.