coming september 16
summer collection: vespers
Vespers, also called Evensong, is a service of evening prayer, contemplation and worship most commonly practiced in the monastic and orthodox traditions. As one of the canonical hours (marking divisions of the day in terms of fixed times of prayer), Vespers focuses on reflection and rest from the day’s activities. I first encountered the spiritual discipline of Vespers at Camp DeSoto, a camp for girls atop Lookout Mountain. Sunday evenings at camp called for a slowing down and exhaling from a full week of activity. During this past season, re-engaging with Vespers at the end of the day, along with contemplation and reflection, has been an anchor to me. The need for these practices is essential as we navigate unrest and crises in our world. Through this collection, I explore the theme of Vespers through employing color and light to capture the counting of hours in the stillness of nature and cloud motifs.
As We Gather, 24x24, Oil on Canvas
Cirrus Circus, 18x24, Oil on Canvas
Wild Strawberries, 24x24, Oil on Canvas
“For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Pushed Curfew, 24x24, Oil on Canvas
Hammering Heart, 24x24, Oil on Canvas
Ginko, collecting in the straße, 18x24, Oil on canvas
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
Side Effects, 24x24, Oil on canvas
All Things Go, 18x2, Oil on Canvas