Trust Landing

Well Friends, here is the new piece as promised. I had a difficult time getting a good image of it with my camera, parts of it are blurry, but I think you can get the feeling of it here. If you want to see it in person, just let me know. It is titled Trust Landing. It is my fist piece of visual art work since January - a long dry spell. Although as I reflect on the last half of a year I understand that it was also a fertile time with lots of life happening, and I believe that lots of life creates art that touches people and brings us in relationship with art. I used some new approaches on this creation. The image is long, it measures about 24 inches long and 5.5 inches wide. As you may remember I often use book covers for my canvases. For this piece I needed a new technique to bind them together so that the woman and umbrella could stay together. I used a new method to fuse the book covers. If you look closely you can see the lines where they come together. There is a collage under the blue sky which when in person with it you can see through. You may be able to see maps of Montana old-lady wall paper and cave art. This under layer reminds me that there is always an underlying story in our lives. We are made up of non-us stories. They are like the ground water of our lives flowing underneath.  At the meditation retreat that I recently attended there were many people from Vietnam. I love their features and I have found myself drawing people with this likeness lately. The wonam in this image has some of those features. To me, there is also an indigenous quality to this woman's features. And as always she also reflects parts of me, which looking closely I think you'll see.This painting/illustration says more to me than words could. I don't fully understand it's emotional content.  When I was working on it I thought that she was coming down for a landing. Recently a friend of mine told me that she thought she was going up. As you may recall Mary Poppins goes both ways -  flying and landing with her umbrella. Metaphorically speaking, so do I. There is something very hopeful in this image to me, and at the same time an acceptance that life is often difficult. Perhaps the aid of an umbrella can soften the blow of landing on a big pile of stones.