Gallery

As a very young child I stood in the bows of the ship in mid-Atlantic; all sounds of the human world were erased by the wind, I saw endless sea meeting endless sky. My tiny self was filled with the immensity of the world. The wonder of that experience, its sights, sounds and sensations are alive in me today.

Growing up in cultivated lands on the edge of the Bush, its wildness always seemed close. Our neighbors in the nearby waterways were snakes and alligators who visited regularly. Bright butterflies looked like huge blossoms taking flight, my favorites were the shimmering blue “number-noughts”.

Brilliantly colored birds, including yellow kiskadees who raided the fruit bowl on our table, and noisily chattering flocks of parrots provided the background sounds of the days. The nights were alive with frog voices calling for rain and the inevitable mosquito hum trapped in the nets under which we slept.

The tropical colors were etched into my imagination, along with the feel of the winds and rains on my skin and the sounds of the more-than human world which we inhabited.

Although I have since lived in large cities – New York, Seville, San Francisco, Los Angeles – for many years, the core of my being still strongly reacts to the natural world. Making art feeds this connectedness. Everything of the outer world that I have drawn or painted resides in me. Art-making helps me express both wonder, love and grief, The magic of art is that it can transcend time, space and human differences. May we unite to honor the fragile beauty of our Earth-home!
We are indeed fortunate to belong to an amazingly beautiful planet. These paintings attempt to honor our great good fortune.

Poetry inspires

This time – Santiago by David Whyte (www.davidwhyte.com} and wandering and draw
ing in England

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside

hiding then revealing the way you should take,

the road dropping away from you as if leaving you

to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,

when you thought you would fall,

and the way forward always in the end

the way that you followed, the way that carried you

into your future, that brought you to this plac

no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,

no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:

the sense of having walked from far inside yourself

out into the revelation, to have risked yourself

for something that seemed to stand both inside you

and far beyond you, that called you back

to the only road in the end you could follow, walking

as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice

that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,

so that one day you realized that what you wanted

had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place

you had lived in before you began,

and that every step along the way, you had carried

the heart and the mind and the promise

that first set you off and drew you on and that you were

more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way

than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:

as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city

with golden towers, and cheering crowds,

and turning the corner at what you thought was the end

of the road, you found just a simple reflection,

and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back

and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:

like a person and a place you had sought forever,

like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;

like another life, and the road still stretching on.

Walking daily along the creek brings peace in a troubled time

Where do you go? Share here…..

I found all this plastic in a space of a hundred yards of creek bank and made an ugly bouquet each day..

each day an Ugly Bouquet

I noticed the sources of the trash and posted the “bouquets” on Instagram and which #companies contributed trash.

13 days on the banks of one small creek in one suburban Texas town

On Instagram, I heard from people all over the world – from Cayman Islands, Australia, Asia, England – all sharing photos and stories of cleaning up the tidal wave of plastic in rivers and oceans. Some of the tourists to the Caymans were using their vacation to clean up the beaches Yay!

We are a movement. Are you with us?

I wrote to #Trader Joes, #Krogers and #Sprouts (I shop locally here) and asked them to stop distributing single use plastic. No response from #Krogers (although their back parking lot was cleaned up. Later I heard it was by city-sponsored volunteers); deafening silence from Sprouts – although a checker assured me that there was no chance of limits to plastic there. #Trader Joes responded and said they were planning to reduce plastic – and weeks later they began. You TJ shoppers will have noticed.

On my walks I met a couple who filled 12 industrial trash bags with garbage collected a few hundred yards further downstream. We high-fives and encouraged each other. On other walks little girls asked me what I was doing. I told them that the plastic hurt the tummies of the fish and the birds in the creek and in the oceans. Two little boys who really understood why, pitched in and made their own piles of trash.

A Vegan restaurant also understood and invited me to show ant-plastic art – see “Our Legacy” post (#Healthy Hippie Cafe Watauga, TX)

A friend sent me to a show of sculpture made from plastic trash collected from Oregon Beaches by an artist and her team. Washedashore.org. Whereas I was just trying to attract local attention to plastic that was going from the creek into the garbage cans, The creativity and technical knowhow expressed by Washed Ashore team have captured the attention of thousands of people ….

LOOK…Look!