New Pieces at Kansas Earth & Sky Candle Company
If spring cleaning bites you with the decorating bug, please drop by the Kansas Earth and Sky Candle Company in Ellinwood for a new flower power painting lovingly made with earth materials.
50th Annual Smoky Hill Art Exhibition
I’m so honored that Spirit of an Autumn Tree was selected for the 50th Annual Smoky Hill Art Exhibition in Hays. I have a special relationship with trees, because they are so uncommon here. I think Willa Cather described it best in her book My Antonia, “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about then, and visit them as if they were persons.” I imagine this tree as my Cottonwood spirit clothed in the fading cloak of late summer leaves, resolutely facing the coming wind that will usher in change. It is acrylic with natural elements, including limestone, prairie soil and rainwater. The painting received the smoke of fallen leaves to symbolize change that comes to all deciduous trees. At such times, nature reminds us there is a time to let go.
All Things are Mended
Then I discovered the prairie, and a slow healing began. Stephen R. Jones, The Last Prairie
For a short while before the heated winds arrive, the prairie greens up. In the eastern part of Kansas, the spring land is managed by burning the pasture to sweep away old growth and strengthen the root system. A healing begins quite suddenly, as the scorched earth quickly gives way to a vista of intoxicating growth. Here is nature’s reminder that all things are mended. For this piece, I began work in the late afternoon of the spring equinox before the full moon rose, letting it gather that celestial energy of the transition. It has hand-laid stone texture embedded with grain, oxidized iron, acrylic and the ash of Eastern Red Cedar and Indian grass.