THE MOUNTAIN PASSAGES CYCLE

"The Mountain Opens to Speak it's Name," 2011. 

 Passage is the act of passing, specifically movement from one place to another, sometimes a change of progress from one process or condition to another. Permission, right, or a chance to pass is often required. Passage is also a way or means of passing, as in a journey, especially by water; a voyage, and passage is that which happens or takes place between persons.

In all these senses, paintings have always presented passages – imagined, proposed, hoped for, sometimes prayed for. They have always offered openings, permissions, journeys, all proffering passage from one process or condition to another.




 If the Spanish poet Machado was right, that we who pass on, even a little, walk, like Jesus, on the water, then artists and their work offer one partial exception – we artists and our work leave tracks of both where we’ve come from and, because of the imaginative intercourse a work of art summons us to, they point to where we’re all going.

But paintings are quite still, aren’t they? Exactly! Paintings and the seeing and meanings they summon us to present an endless quest going nowhere in space or time but only deeper into the presence. There is grace in this - the grace of knowing that our consciousness and the light are always arriving in the world together. And in this momentary stillness there is a great Hello!

It was my sixtieth year when I started this series “The Mountain Passages Cycle.” It was the year I moved to this secluded hollow along Warwoman Creek in the North Georgia Mountains. It was the month of April, Kawani in Cherokee – the Cherokee moon of reviving rivers and re-emerging medicinal plants. A season to take stock, to relent and to let go, and then to recover the deeper language of rhythms and patterns woven into the fabric of all those years. A time to really paint what I see (as the saying goes by painters), but now to acknowledge that seeing as a gift of presence as much as an act of perception, of coming into Being, not just observing.

"Spring Comes to Kawani," 2015

 Presence, present, to be present – these are all entangled for me now. The massive northern shoulder of Rainy Mountain slopes down to meet the flood plain just behind my studio. From late fall to early spring it is a massive shadowed cloak that descends, and from spring to fall it is a bright green lit body. It is not present as a picture. It hovers dramatically between being just some of the furniture of the world and startlingly something else: something protean, powerful and energetic, something drawing my own presence into its circle, always shouldering against where I am, against what I see, what I feel, and who I am. Then one morning I step outside the studio to see that Rainy Mountain has dissolved – the mists that live in these mountains have taken it for their own form of presence- an expression of the world making, unmaking and remaking itself, a process of re-becoming, like ocean waves that rise and then refold into one another. Even in the seeming millennial immutability of this land, some aspect, some dimension, breathes. The very ineffability makes possible the expansive reality of the land around me. It is a great gift to witness.

NEW PAINTING: Spring Comes to Kawani

"Spring Comes to Kawani," 2015, oil on board, 12"h x 12"w.
Private collection.

The seasons come and go so, and more quickly so as I get older. Both in the outer landscape and the inner inscape. Spring this year seemed like a long time coming, but then suddenly one morning took up a rapacious gate. So differently experienced from fall, which comes on with flames, a last bright declaration, like an unrepentant warrior's last stand against all the destruction facing the world. Spring, on the other hand, begins hidden deep in the ground, stirring for long silent weeks something alchemical.

Beginning in March with those few unexpected errant warm days, I step out each morning onto my porch to gaze eastward looking for spring across the field past the studio to where a patch of woods slips out into the field and follows the path of a spring that runs underground there (I know this because I am blessed with the archaic gift of the dowser). Pine and poplar stand sentinel here, creating an understory where wild cherry and dogwood shelter beneath them. In this early morning spring light, with much still cloaked in darkness, with much that is stilled this time of day, I can see that this is the advance column of the once great and future forest that has always claimed rightful sovereignty to these mountains. Me, I'm just passing through.

New Painting & New Beginnings: "Spring Comes to the Cataloochee Valley"

"Spring Comes to the Cataloochee Valley," 2015, oil on canvas. 24" x 36"

Recently I have come to appreciate with acute sharpness, the experience of the 15 years I have now spent living in the mountains of the Southern Appalachians. They have been such richly deepening years for myself and my life partner Lynn. We have been so fortunate, and these mountains and their people have been so generous in their offering gifts. I have watched them change us, mellow us, and sharpen our commitments for what really matters. And feeling now that our time here is such a fleeting gift, as it always was in truth, as it always is for any of us any where, I have begun a series of paintings that are both landscape and inscape. Something to hold onto, like old photographers used to do fixing an image out of evanescent light emerging in the dark with chemicals. Art is like that. Life too.

This painting "Spring Comes to Cataloochee Valley," is the first, and it was inspired by my most recent of many visits to the Cataloochee Valley in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was early May, spring just creeping across the valley, and it was morning when you can see how the mountains come and go so, mixing with great moving cloud banks. They've done this each early May for ever, and so each May, early in the morning, you can come see this forever.