Lead Me to the Water

Art is not living. It's the use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art. - Audre Lorde

First creation of 2012:


Lead Me to the Water
encaustic mixed media
5x7 inches

I recently started reading a memoir of a woman who lives in Alaska called Surviving the Island of Grace: Life on the Wild Edge of America by Leslie Leyland Fields. I laugh at myself because yes, I am one of those that romanticizes the rugged, self-reliant life out in the wilderness. It just fascinates me. Perhaps because I know I would totally fail at such a life! I mean, my aloe plant that lives in my studio is not doing very well. Anyway, in the prologue she writes about how she came to write about her life in Alaska and she quotes another writer's words about memoir:

Listen to your life...See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moment and life itself is grace. - Frederick Beuchner

I approach my artmaking that way. Or at least I try to.