Artist's Statement
As both a poet and painter, I marry myself to the landscape. My paintings and poems emerge from this process of what I call "one-ing" with aspects of Nature. All that is "marvelous and surreal!" exclaims Andre Breton.
The Great Glacier, Nature's monumental sculptor, has left us with her gifts; meltwater streams once flowed, gifting us the kettle pond, our Northeast-facing harbor and the harbor's rocky shoulder, the small wooded hill with its perched boulder, the serpent kame, and glacial moraine. And North from here, winding along the Merrimack River, the alleuvial plain which the glacier left to its human caregivers, to our friend Eero and those who farm the land, over 50 acres of rich and stoneless soil to the depth of inches.
Nature includes human beings, and I celebrate along with poet Michael McClure when he exclaims: "We are meat-mammalian!"
Through poems and paintings, I bear witness to the disenfranchised, to the voices that somehow remained silent until now. When the poem is written, we hear them. Their voices come to us from the deep Oceanic Floor of Silence or out of the great Void of Space. The poem is the magical eardrum, the poem is the sacred drum. The poet--she--empties herself to accomplish this. In this way, the poet becomes a vessel, the poem contains and uplifts the voices of the disenfranchised.
"The quality of Light will take you there,
the light's intensity and strength
luminescence or incandescence,
depending on how far the sun has left to travel today,
and from what determined station
along the deep, dark road of the year
the sun fires and spins
through the Milky Way of Time and Space
above this heeling globe, our dwelling place."
"The lights direction, the lights focus
will let you know indirectly
as lobes of light glow upon the windblown blades of grass
moving in the easy summer airs of Massachusetts Bay
across the meadow below Gingerbread Hill
where Lucretia Brown picks dandelion leaves
under bright yellow blossoms to make her tea. . .
"The light's direction, the light's focus
will let you know directly
as you stand on Stargazer's fishing boat
in Doliber's Cove, floating on the edge of the sea,
your face uplifted to the sun
that has slowly sailed above his taffrail
beyond the main halyard to the raked mastpeak
and sunlight drills his pine-planked decks
stained with the blood of fish.
"The light will show you what to look for,
through its myriad filters, by their existence of absence,
as you find yourself in Joseph Brown's applegrove
and the light dances a reel and a jig through feathery branches,
green leaves and red fruit shining
with the soft gloss of old sailcloth . . ."**
I welcome you into my studio of poems and paintings.
It is messy -- I work in many mediums.
Walk with me around "Black Joe's Pond"
