Following the Thread: As Summer Recedes

Chronicle #061526

While photographing older work for the website, I uncovered a painting I created in 2012 called As Summer Recedes.

I thought I was just cataloging inventory, but I found a breadcrumb!

Lately I've been thinking about how artists leave clues for themselves.

We make a piece because we are fascinated by something in the moment, then we move on. Years later we discover that the same questions have been quietly following us all along.

This sunflower was painted more than a decade before Path of the Spiritweaver existed.

Yet here it was.

A flower standing at the edge of a season.

A work about transition.

A surface built from layers of paint, pattern, collage, and memory.

A moment suspended between what has been and what comes next.

Sound familiar?

Today I think and write often about remembrance, transformation, cycles, and becoming. I carve symbols into stamps and etch into paint. I build worlds from fragments of paper and paint and chance.

Back then, I didn't have language for any of that.

I was simply following an instinct.

Looking at this piece now, I realize that many of the threads I thought were new have actually been traveling with me for years.

Perhaps that is what an artistic life really is.

Not a series of disconnected ideas.

A long conversation with yourself.

One symbol appears.

Then another.

A flower.

A star.

An eye.

A doorway.

A season ending.

A season beginning.

And years later you realize you were never lost at all.

You were simply following the thread.

View the Details:

As Summer Recedes (2012) - Original Mixed Media on Board - Framed