NESTS

NESTS:

                                          Nest Series: Luminis
(watermedia/collage, 18X18 inches)

                       Refuge, protection, safety, newness, hatchery…….these are a few words of symbolism I attach to the recent series of art pieces I’ve been working on. My new show, entitled THE NESTS will be featured at the Weems Old Town Gallery in Albuquerque throughout the month of May.  Last week I delivered fourteen new mixed media paintings and nine clay “Earth Angels” for the show.

My studio has become a comfortable nest over the years. When I began to work in there in 1979, and the materials started to pile up around me, my husband made some wry comments about my “nesting instinct.” I’m not sure how instinctual it is, but there’s no question that the clutter of colors and textures and shapes are a hatchery, an incubator if you will, for my creative endeavors.
Several years ago my co-teacher, Lynette Watkins, and I began to talk of “new beginnings” as a theme for the class we would teach at the La Romita School of Art in Terni, Italy. That’s when the “nest” symbol began to make itself known in my work along with eggs, which are poignant symbols of birth, hope, creative purity and expectation.  In Lynette’s work symbolic “gates” and “keys” emerged.
Dramatic and powerful changes were happening in my personal life. Some of them seemed not at all like new beginnings but rather like endings. Changes occurred that were making an end to the life I had known and expected to continue knowing. My 36 year old son suffered a devastating stroke that left the right side of his body paralyzed and took away all, ALL, ABSOLUTELY ALL of his language. Two years later I was rushed into emergency open heart surgery for mitral valve replacement and multiple by-passes.  Much changed but I experienced, in the depths of heart-break for my son, and the fright of my own physical broken heart, a rock-solid foundation in my relationship with God. A tiny newness began to nestle around me, a secure and steady glory-of-hope, a nest (if you will) of beginning, the commencement of a new level of living in grace. Imagine that! express that! I needed to.

      Nest Series: Packet of Remembrance
(watermedia/collage, 13X10 inches)

What color is a “new beginning”? and what shape is it? What texture does it have? Creative expression helps to make sense of happenings in my world….. is that what vocations are? or pre-occupations? or “callings”? Are they methods of making sense? I love words and sometimes, often actually, put them in my works. Also I journal, journal, journal. I carry a journal with me at all times, loading book after book with drivel, thoughts, snippets of information and sketches that help me keep my bearings. But when I sit down to string words together into sentences for someone else to read, they aren’t big enough, fitting enough, or just right.
                             Nest Series: Nesting Notations
(mixed media on a cradled panel, 24X12X2 inches)

And often the creative expressions (paintings, collages, assemblages) miss the mark also, they’re not big enough, or should I say “deep enough” or “expansive enough”? Some of them get close. The creative expressions in the THE NESTS SERIES are my attempt to make sense of the refuge, the safety, the hope, the newness, the expectancy I am experiencing in my life and the life of my family (which includes not just my husband, daughter, and son but also my extended family of relatives and friends, fellow travelers on my life’s journey.)

Nest Series: By Grit
(mixed media on a cradled panel, 12X12X2 inches)
Additional images from the Nest Series may be seen on the pages of my website. My son is making a superb recovery. He lives and works in Austin and gets therapy at Austin Speech Labs.