autumn equinox 2022

Lately in the morning when I walk the fields it is wet with dew. I come home with my boots plastered with grass. Our front walk has begun to accumulate sugar maple leaves. The light and air have been so beautiful I took my paints outside. With a board on top of a garden wagon I painted in the September air, swiping paint in wide stripes on big pages, slowly moving the wagon-desk into the shade as the sun shifted. I was working out my dreams on paper and letting them dry like leaves on the gravel.

Yesterday morning I looked through ten years of photographed slip decorated plates. I scrolled through looking at each September to see how each autumn’s reflection looked. I studied each plate and the overall progression. I didn’t arrive at any answers for the next series, but it gave me confidence in a natural evolution. I gained assurance that I can trust my dreams. I can go to sleep in summer and wake up with the clarity of autumn.

During the summer my dreams are often out at sea. The floating ideas are rafts made of the flimsiest bits of marks and words. My work becomes an accidental accumulation of what floats by as I stare out to the horizon. I am rescuing the intriguing bits so that a rhythm of memory, insight and mark become woven together. The accumulation allows me to float with buoyancy out of the waves of summer into fields of autumn where the grass becomes my muse.