SGV Spring Arts Show vía Facebook

ARTIST STATEMENT

First electronic art show while under quarantine. 

I had been ogling a deluxe Stabilo pencil set for over a year, it arrived all the way from England in a beautiful cherrywood box, just when the coronavirus struck. Some Friday the 13th. My mind was alternately elastic, or a black hole—expanding and contracting—leaving me lost on alien shores of doubt and regret. I couldn’t make art. I couldn’t think. I had the attention span of a newt. The only thing that saved me was driving theback roads to my job. Car botanizing on the back-backroads of home. All this beauty and I couldn’t even leave my car. So beautiful, it almost hurts. I went the long way home whenever possible, sometimes taking hours to get home. This tree, and rock became my anchor. My salvation. I watched the greenery meld into a rainbow fest of flowers. First on the scene were the colors of the sun—buttercups and creamcups, meadowfoam and popcorn flowers, followed by the blazoning poppies, fiery dock, and the magenta flame of mallow, and owl’s clover, the sacred indigo breath of sky lupine, and the majestic finale of purple ookow, and Ithuriel’s spears—secret yarrow in the distance. Meanwhile, the mountain witnessed the passage of the season. In this way I began to find my out of the horror of what is, and what will be for a long time to come. This meadow, my salvation.Tomorrow, the hills will be a little less green, a fleeting moment in time. I am reminded of Robert Duncan’s poem:

“Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.”

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

When I was a young and uninformed poet, Robert Duncan always included me in readings, encouraged me to keep on writing. —Maureen Hurley