Luminous Simplicity

I've been working on a series of 18x18 inch paintings for the past 6 weeks--some of them previously posted on this blog. They are minimal, atmospheric and full of nuances of color.  And, they are pure joy to paint.

Again, inspired by my surroundings and the atmosphere that is the Pacific NW, the paintings suggest landscapes, hills, mist, water and clouds.  It is these elements in their abstraction that give the paintings structure and a relatedness that I hope creates a safe place for the viewer to begin navigating the spaces.  And if more than the 10 seconds that is characteristically spent on an image is applied to seeing, I think there can be  found  in the places where light meets dark and sky meets land the thresholds between what is visible and invisible, sayable and unsayable.

I'm calling these paintings my luminous simplicity paintings.  They speak of contemplation and the mystery of finding more said through saying less.

These paintings will be on view in the LOFT at Kat Schneider Studio | Gallery in Bellingham, WA for First Friday Artwalk, May 6th from 6 pm to 9 pm.  In my opinion, they are much better viewed in person than in thumbnail form. 

The Atmospheres of our Existence

Enticed to Continue, 24 x 30 in, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Atmospheric and Abstract Landscape Painting by Sharon Kingston
Inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

And I thought the titles I derived from Rilke's words were poetic!  I'm going to have to use this phrase sometime, the atmospheres of our existence, because it really does sum up what my intent is and how I approach the questions I have about it all.  Here are the words-- and I really do cherish hearing these-- from the collector who is adding this painting to her art collection.

Enticed to Continue...is wonderful!!!  I'm very excited to have added another piece of your work to my collection.  I don't know how you do it, but your paintings are indeed poems on canvas.  As an artist you are wonderfully creative with your use of color, with your technique, and most of all with revealing the atmospheres of our existence with ease and grace and a certain splendor that is irresistible.

Making a World Again

Making a World Again, 18x18 oil on canvas
Atmospheric and Abstract Painting by Sharon Kingston
Inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Last year, shortly after painting Making a World in honor of Earth Day, the Rilke poem which inspired this painting (and the 2011 adaptation shown at left) surfaced in a book I had just purchased by Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece, in a chapter about Pierre Bonnard.  Bonnard lived what some would call a cloistered life largely due to his partner Marthe's illness.  It is from this circumscribed world that he created his fantastical interiors.

Comparing the abstract painter Joan Mitchell's own self imposed exile to Vetheuil in her later years to Bonnard's claustrophobic existence, Kimmelman points out the traces of wistfulness in the ecstasy they both brought to the canvas.  He says, "silence and warmth pervade the pictures of both, the warmth and silence of a partially dreamed-up past, which seems sweeter and more precious because it is gone or never was.  Nathan Kernan, a poet who collaborated with Mitchell on a portfolio of prints she made at the end of her life, has recounted an episode, shortly before she died, when she asked him to select poems to read at a friend's funeral.  When he read Rainer Maria Rilke's Entrance to her, she said, "Save that one for me."  So he did, for her memorial.  And it also speaks to Marthe's effect on Bonnard."

Joan Mitchell, After April

Making a World (Entrance)

Whoever you may be, step into the evening
Step out of the room where everything is known
Whoever you are
your house is the last before the far off
With your eyes, which are almost
too tired to free themselves from the familiar
You slowly take one black tree
and set it against the sky
slender, alone.
And you have made a world.
It is big
and like a word, still ripening in silence
And though your mind would fabricate its meaning
Your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.

Pierre Bonnard, Le Nu Gris

My Color Field Translations

Springtimes Have Needed You, Oil on Canvas, 18 x 18 in
Atmospheric & Abstract Landscape Paintings by Sharon Kingston
Inspired by the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Mark Rothko's minimalist color field paintings and his method of trapping luminosity through layered thin transparent glazes continues to influence my painting practice.  I consider Rothko and Rilke my main muses.  Their works inspire me in finding meaning and method in my paintings-- both having been present in my world of art since the beginning.  Although most certainly suggesting landscape, the simplicity of these three paintings reference Rothko's  compositions.  This reduction of the plane into three sections allows me to focus on edge, textural nuances, depth and atmosphere and of course, color.  The most recent of what I call my color field translations, Springtimes Have Needed You, began with Quinacridone Gold Brown and has evolved with 4 layers of yellows and earth tones.  Interestingly, all three of these paintings resonate with the seasons in which they were painted.  When the Knowing Comes evolved out of the last burst of color in the Fall, Mist during those long, cold, grey and misty Winter days and now Springtimes Have Needed You while I wait desperately for the warmth of the sun to return and ease the numbness from my fingers while I try to paint. 

Mist, Oil on Gessobord, 12 x 12 in
Abstract Landscape by Sharon Kingston

April 20th, A Year with Rilke by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.


As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?

When the Knowing Comes, Oil on Canvas, 30 x 30 in
Abstract Landscape Painting by Sharon Kingston
Inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

From the First Duino Elegy
Rainer Maria Rilke

Gratitude Painting Nearing Completion

Where the Great Heron Feeds, Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in.

This painting will be donated to Geneva Elementary School.  It is nearly complete.  After drying for about a week, I will put on a unifying glaze and then a varnish (since it'll be residing in an elementary school).  My friend Sheri at Fourth Corner Frames is donating a portion of the cost of framing.  To me it is one big thank you to a school community for easing my worries and wrapping my children in safekeeping-see previous post here.

I'll post the final in a few weeks.

A Gentle Binding and Releasing

A Gentle Binding and Releasing, 30 x 30 in, oil on canvas
on exhibit at Art with a Heart Gallery, Seattle

Rilke writes often in his Letters to a Young Poet about the importance of solitude to the creative process and of the challenges we will face in protecting this space.  Maybe this is harder for extroverts to manage, but I really take the need for solitude and a space of one's own as a given. Quite aptly applied to maintaining the self in any relationship, here are his words.

The experience of loving, that now disappoints so many, can actually change and be transformed from the ground up into the building of a relationship between two human beings, not just a man and a woman.  And this more authentic love will be evident in the utterly considerate, gentle, and clear manner of its binding and releasing.  It will resemble what we now struggle to prepare: the love that consists of two solitudes which border, protect, and greet each other.

Solitude means something different to everyone. My relationship with my husband is one in which his support and enthusiasm and willingness to listen to the doubt-trodden artist I am is unwavering.  There really are times when he believes in me more than I do in myself--and he props me up gently and lovingly.  So, maintaining the artist-self in my relationship works because we have maintained our independence within our interdependence.

In my situation, solitude is more about a private studio space than anything else.  In order for me to realize my potential in the creative process, I need a safe zone.  Safe from other voices, critiques, and prying eyes. Even harmless curiosity can zap the spirit out of a work.  I need a protective space around my ideas so that they may evolve and find clarity in their own time.   A place to play in my own way and to sing when I'm joyful and swear when I'm frustrated.  A space that is free of explanation--to anyone.  And because I never stop thinking about my works, solitude for me is sometimes just finding quiet time to contemplate.  My best imagining most often happens during the early morning hours before I'm even fully awake.

I'm rereading Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr.  Originally purchased in 2001 when I had two small children in the house.  At that time it was quite difficult to find the physical or the mental space in which to create.  There will come the time, which has already been set in motion, for the gentle releasing of their sweet souls to the world also.

Finding Meaning in the Paint Itself

Earlier this week I referenced a post from SlowMuse about What Painting Is by James Elkins. I was able to pickup  a copy of the book at the library and want to share some more of his thoughts about the idea of alchemy and paint.  This topic came up in a lunch conversation with a fellow artist today and has been circling my head for a while now as I understand more and more what I don't understand about how and why I paint. Especially now when art seems all about concept, it is refreshing to read about the mystery of the material itself and the power it has over us artists as we strive to formulate and respond to the quest to create meaning from pigments.

There was some of this magic going on this week in this painting--I was aware of the mystery but unable to comprehend the how.  The previous layers, the formulation of medium and paint, the temperature of the room, my state of mind--resulted in something beyond the physicality of the paint and surface. Some might say that I was visited by the painting fairy/muse (Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com) a discussion for another day, but I believe it may have been a lucky merging of material factors.
 From What Painting Is:

detail from What Waits Within Me.

There is a word, hypostasis, that describes what happens when fluids and stones seem to have inner meaning, and when numbers come alive.  Properly speaking, it is a religious concept: Jesus was the hypostatic incarnation of the Word of God into the ordinary substance of a human body, meaning that he was spirit that became flesh.  A hypostasis is a descent from an incorporeal state into ordinary matter, or in general an infusion of spirit into something inert.  It can describe the feeling that numbers have "souls and formal lives," and it can explain the notion that two fluids, mingling in a bottle or on a canvas, are somehow expressing a state of mind. 
Hypostasis is the feeling that something as dead as paint might also be deeply alive, full of thought and expressive meaning.  One moment paint is nearly nothing, an excuse for some historian to write about the influence of Florence on Siena, or the difficulties of realistic painting--and then suddenly it is also there in all its stubborn weight and thickness, clinging to the canvas, gathering dust, wrinkling with age...And when it is merely paint, it begins to speak in an uncanny way, telling us things that we cannot quite understand.  It seems to be infused with moods, with obscure thoughts, and ultimately--in the language of alchemy and religion--with soul, spirit, and "formal life." From that moment on, it never stops speaking.  Like alchemists, painters are bound up in hypostatic contemplation: paint seems irresistibly to mean, as if the littlest dab must signify something.  It never speaks clearly because--as any sober scientist or humanist will tell you--every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.  Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand.  And in painting there is another element in the equation, which suddenly makes the feeling of meaning tremendously interesting: the paint was laid down by an artist who also had hypostatic feelings about paint, and so it is also possible to interpret those feelings in pictures instead of just imagining them.  The most reliable way to do that--if anything this tenuous and personal can be called reliable--is to look at the marks as evidence of the motions of the painter's body.  It is also possible for paint itself to have meaning as it works against itself, over and under itself, on the canvas.  All of this is speculative, and most of it is useless to cold art history, but it is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling.  Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.

Widening My Circle

Heading North Towards Home

Today began with snow--in April.  Today I opened my emails to find a most touching note from a friend and collector about my work. And today I widened my circle.   Unlike the web, which can offer an artist an amazingly diverse and vast geographic audience for one's work in thumbnail digital, breaking out of the local and into the larger gallery scene is quite a daunting proposition. Today marked my entry into an entirely different group of people who will experience and respond to my work.  

I captured the mist laden atmosphere as best I could while driving with my i-phone camera (I know!).  It was a symbolic day and I wanted to have this scene to remember it by.  Time to get back to the studio and paint.

UnContrived

I aspire to paint atmosphere, emotion, and memory--with oil paint.  What one might call the essence or sensation of a landscape, these spaces become metaphors for my struggles, most often those associated with the creative life.   However, as happened with this painting, using local landscape references can be problematic if I start to get too attached in a painting to what I see instead of what I feel:  forcing a subject instead of responding to the glob of paint on the canvas.  That instead of coaxing the painting's evolution, I begin to think too much and know too much and  act too much out of the wrong brain. I call it getting too literal.

From James Elkins in What Painting Is:  Oil paint can’t be entrancing just because it can create an illusion, because every medium does that. No: painters love paint itself, so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to, rather than abandoning it and taking up pencil drawing, or charcoal, or watercolor, or photography…It is no wonder that painters can be so entranced by paint. Substances occupy the mind profoundly, tethering moods to thoughts, tangling stray feelings with the movement of the body, engaging the full capacity of response and concentrating it on unpromising lumps of paint and color. There is no meaning that cannot seem to flow from the paint itself. (thanks to SlowMuse by Deborah Barlow for turning me onto Elkin's ideas.)

I caught myself well into this work forcing the subject and then in an attempt to correct, I got too tight.  Today, in my new studio with its fantastic light and energy, I finally grooved into that right space where I was responding to the paint and color again.  Although completely suggestive of many a place, this painting is purely an imagined landscape that carries with it this sentiment.

What Waits Within Me, 24 x 30 in. Oil on Canvas

I believe in all that has never been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

Book of Hours I, 12
Rilke

A Painting and A Poem for today

Enticed to Continue,  24 x 30 in, oil on canvas   SOLD

Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunlit one.
The way to it, barely begun, lies ahead.
So we are grasped by what we have not grasped,
full of promise, shining in the distance.

It changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something we barely sense, but are;
a movement beckons, answering our movement...
But we just feel the wind against us.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Uncollected Poems

The Unity of Dread and Bliss

I have spent much of the day writing the backstories to the paintings that are heading to a new gallery in Seattle this week.  Previously in this blog I talked about how the painting Nimbus Grey was conceived and created on the day that I decided to give up the role of gallerist (which also coincided with having just spent months painting sky studies).  Last week at artwalk I was telling the story of the significance to me of the beautiful fir stretcher bars that back this painting. These were handmade for my artist friend Jane Hamilton Hovde by her husband AJ Hovde over 30 years ago--and then gifted to me. For many years my young children and I had delivered library books to Jane's home.  She shared with us over tea all her wonderful tales of the artistic life she led, all while surrounded by her fantastic paintings and view of Samish Bay.    You can read a bit about Jane and AJ's most exciting life here, including friendships with Jack Shadbolt, Mark Tobey and W.H. Auden.  Ironically, opening the gallery and other obligations had prevented me from visiting Jane for some time.  All in all, I had been quite intimidated to approach this canvas given its history and personal connection, but opportunity and intent met preparation--finally.


Title: Nimbus Grey (Embracing the Storm) 

Size: 70 x 50 inches

Medium: Oil on Canvas

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has deeply influenced my work for more than a year now.  Even when I think that I'm "taking a break" from his words and just painting a cloud--it is not so.  I began this big painting on the day I made a big decision in my professional life.  A decision that  left me feeling both untethered and uncertain.  But in making the decision I experienced an exhilaration associated with stepping into a storm.  Pure bliss to create, I found myself inside this work when painting it and felt an intimacy unique to its scale.

Here from a writing by Rilke which I think about with this work and about discovering the unity of dread and bliss.

The person who has not, in a moment of firm resolve, accepted--yes, even rejoiced in--what has struck him with terror--he has never taken possession of the full, ineffable power of our existence.  He withdraws to the edge; when things play out, he will be neither alive nor dead.  

Paintings - Seattle, Me - New Studio

It has been an eventful couple of months--days, in fact.  The closing of my gallery (Works on Canvas) so that I can devote more time to painting and less to running a gallery business, two studio moves and now, representation in Seattle.  Whew, my head is a spinning.

Mike and Jack had attended an exhibit at Works on Canvas Gallery over a year ago--and when they came again this Friday during artwalk it was with a great deal of news for themselves.  The opening of a gallery on 1st Avenue/Pioneer Square in Seattle in May is making their lives eventful.  And that they'd like to exhibit my paintings, specifically my Reading Rilke paintings and large Nimbus Grey painting, is making mine ever so exciting.  So in between scrambling to paint the walls and floor and move into my new pinch me if it's real studio, I'm packing up 8 paintings and taking them to Seattle next week to Mike and Jack's fabulous new gallery.  My first First Thursday opening on May 5.  Cool, huh?  And all this while Mercury is retrograding...

Here is the info.  

Art With A Heart Gallery’s Grand Opening May Show, “HAZ TODO CON AMOR”, is Thursday May 5, 2011 6-9pm, during the Pioneer Square First Thursday Art Walk. Art With A Heart Gallery specializes in the contemporary fine art of emerging and mid-career artists, with a primary goal of being able to promote and nurture careers of “challenged” artists as well as the work of established artists. The range of work includes paintings, works on paper, photography, jewelry, and sculpture with an emphasis on painting. Art With A Heart Gallery is host to about 20 resident artists, and monthly showcased artists.

Art With A Heart Gallery is located at 570 1^st Ave South, Seattle, WA 98104. Telephone: (206) 623-3508

My new studio before its new paint job.

Before, Gray and Gray

After:  Painted Concrete and White Walls
by me.  Oooh so toxic that enamel paint.