This is the latest image of Unchartered Waters. I've been concentrating mostly on the right and center of the canvas. I'm moving toward the left side as I go.
For the past few years it has been a challenge to paint. And the subject matter has been as interesting to me as the work itself. I was happily painting away until Mom came to stay with my sister a couple of years ago. She had cancer and was dying and needed help. During this time most of my thoughts and energy was toward Mom and my sister. The paintings were mostly flowers. Many light colors with dark brown backgrounds.
I had never painted flowers before this time. And there were only few of them. After Mom passed I didn't feel anything to paint. Instead, I edited a book I'd written years earlier. And with the help of my children finished that project. This year the pieces I am doing begin with an image that is based on some sort of reality but then it goes off into an abstract idea of things that at this point, I haven't been able to define. I feel like I am searching, swimming through the depths of deep waters. Or navigating through an imaginary world of color and shadow. The other paintings I'm working on all have an element of this in them too.
Unchartered Waters is a reflection of these thoughts. And ironically, have evolved when two tragic oil spills have occurred. One in the Gulf and the other in my beloved Kalamazoo River, in Michigan.
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