WONDER / 11 February - 15 March, 2025 / David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee
Opening Receptions: Friday, February 14, 2025
Wonder - Artist Talk
My husband Thad and I celebrated our son Luke’s first birthday January 27th, so this body of work, made in my first year of motherhood, marks a season of extraordinary joy and novelty. The paintings are reflections on a spring that I watched from Luke’s nursery window. When we came home from the hospital and got settled in our nursing chair, daffodil foliage was just beginning to push up. Making contour line drawings and color studies has always been about slowing down and connecting with nature’s pace for me, but this was a new kind of slowing down, observing, and connecting. I was breaking a long pattern of studio productivity, and I felt good about that not only for my family but also for my work. Years of having observed the seasons through the disciplines of my studio practice added richness to a very new experience of spring.
Watching daffodils grow hour after hour and almost seeing them make progress in real time, I thought of an extraordinary time-lapse sequence of photographs in the BBC’s nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough Life: Plants (2009). The sequence revealed the dancing movements of bulb flowers, ferns, and vines as they grew in a spring woodland garden. When still images collected over weeks were reframed into one minute, the plants seemed to move more like animals move. While this was a wonderful surprise, I was most interested in how familiar the gestures were. Afterall, we perceive the twisting, reaching, unfurling, and lively movements of plants gradually over time. They animate the natural world even while appearing so very quiet and still.
In the virtual tour he gave of Wonder, David Lusk described the abstract and naturalistic qualities of my paintings – the way precisely observed details operate like marks in a pattern. This comes from the process I use to make the work.
Since 2001, I have been making contour line drawings of plants. I choose plants with especially graceful gestures and focus on recording specific details. From the drawings, I cut silhouette shapes that I use as stencils to make paintings. Gradually, I have accumulated an extensive collection of silhouettes from all seasons. They are arranged in stacks around the perimeter of my studio.
Each painting begins with a color idea. The underpainting establishes a key color or a sort of color problem that I hope to resolve in subsequent layers. I move the painting from the easel in my studio onto sawhorses in my shed so that the panel rests horizontally like a tabletop. I arrange silhouette shapes over colors that I want to preserve. I mix paint and spray a layer of color. Again, I add stencils over colors that I want to preserve. I mix another group of colors and spray another layer of paint. This sequence continues with some variations until I am relatively confident that the silhouette shapes and colors have created an interesting atmosphere.
Because silhouette stencils cover the colors that will eventually define the painting, there is a lot of room for surprise in the process. I make records of colors as I add them, but I cannot see the whole until the painting is complete and I remove the stencils. I love this mysterious dimension of the work.
This process feeds my interest in seeing anew and holding onto discoveries and highlights. It is cumulative in nature. I am still using silhouette shapes based on drawings I made twenty years ago, and when I handle my stencils, I think not only about the plants I drew but also about the people who grew them and about my experiences in the places I found them.
Ed Yong’s book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (2022) recently refreshed my sense of wonder in the natural world. The book establishes that as individuals and species we each exist inside distinct sensory bubbles that inform but also limit our understanding of the world. The book explores what animals sense that humans cannot. Straining to imagine left me with a shimmering sense of mystery and possibility. The study underlines how much we do not know and implies the need for restraint, reverence, and respect.
Instead of choosing an example from the book to share with you, I want to share an experience I had with my horse Posy while I was pregnant with Luke. One day, Posy put her face on my stomach and quietly lingered there. I said, “Posy, are you talking to the baby?” Later, I found out that horses feel sound and can hear or feel a human heartbeat from four feet away. Posy was hearing two heartbeats.
I began making the work for this show late summer with this series of Spring Branches. In addition to my memory of spring, I referred to a postcard on my studio wall of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom (1890). I had first seen the painting exhibited at LA County Museum of Art in 1999 before seeing actual almond blossoms flowering spectacularly on a hillside in Cortona, Italy the following spring. I saw the painting again, and picked up the postcard, when Thad and I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on our honeymoon in 2019. Like its subject, the painting seemed to me to carry a particular hint of promise or hope. The dominate colors in the painting are blue-greens, neutrals, and whites. As I mixed colors for my paintings, I liked identifying small amounts of other hues like soft violets, minty greens and blush pinks, and I especially enjoyed mixing a variety of muted blue-greens. Maybe I knew at one time that Van Gogh painted Almond Blossom to celebrate the birth of his nephew and namesake and gave it to his brother Theo to hang in his son’s nursery, but that fact was a happy surprise to me when I started writing this.
My husband, Thad is a writer and helps me title my work. A few notes on these titles:
Spring Branches - After Almond Blossom
This is clearly a reference to Van Gogh’s painting.
Spring Branches - Dream
This is not the first time Thad and I have used dream in a title. On the spectrum from naturalistic to abstract or literal to lyrical, dreamy paintings tend to push toward the more imaginative end especially in terms of color. “Dream” is a reference to seeing the natural world in beautiful dreams through the years and also a reference to hope.
Spring Branches - Hope Fulfilled
This painting’s title refers to the refreshment that comes with spring and also to a favorite proverb: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12
Thad and I spent a long time in the first half of this verse – hoping, but even then I pondered why desire fulfilled was compared to a tree of life. When I read tree of life, I picture big, beautiful trees and that support many other lives in their ecosystems. Luke is a dream come true for Thad and me, and we already see his life blessing our family and community and even strangers with great joy.
The title of the exhibition is Wonder. First a few resonant synonyms: miracle, marvel, curiosity, awe, ponder, amazement.
Wonder is also a reference to The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children (1965) by Rachel Carson. This book came to me through one of my friends from Camp DeSoto, and I immediately recognized that it points to a valuable part of our relationship with our son.
Rachel Carson is known as a pioneer of the environmental movement. This book is based on her experience sharing her love of the natural world with her young nephew Roger. It is warm, playful, and hopeful. It is a short book. Most of it was published in an essay in 1955, but Carson was actively expanding the project when she died in 1964. Something about the unfinished nature of the project feels like an invitation to continue the story, to add to the sensory-rich adventures Carson describes sharing with her young nephew – carrying him along the rocky shores of Maine, searching together for the creatures whose voices they heard in the woods, waking him to watch a full moon setting over shimmering water – accessible beauties that we often miss exactly because they are so accessible.
A few quotes from the book:
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement…If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder…, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.” p 44
“I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.” p 44
“What is the value of preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder, this recognition of something beyond the boundaries of human existence? Is the exploration of the natural world just a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of childhood or is there something deeper?
I am sure there is something much deeper, something lasting and significant….There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring comes after winter.”
Back to the spring paintings.
In terms of color, I see that shift from winter to spring as a gradual transition from mostly neutrals late winter to more and more saturated colors through spring.
In varying proportions, all of the paintings include saturated colors, neutral colors, and muted colors in between.
Two key neutral colors in this body of work are Williamsburg Earth Green which is cooler and Williamsburg Bohemian Green Earth which is warmer. So, for example, a painting that includes these neutral colors and brilliant, saturated blues also includes a variety of mixtures of these hues.
I made Spectacular Winter to put the focus on earth tones. I spent a lot of time mixing neutrals to go into the other paintings and especially enjoyed being with these colors. Their nature is to quietly drop back. Looking at the other paintings in the gallery, these aren’t colors you notice much even though they play important roles. In this painting, I used less saturated color to emphasize these rich neutral and muted colors. I kept noticing this palette in hardwoods along highways and up close in tree bark.
Night Bloom is a nod to the night watches Luke and I kept last spring. I remember the quiet of the dark sky and the warmth of new life in our home. Instead of subduing all of the colors in the painting the way colors even in the evenings, I wanted the dark background to provide strong contrast to brilliant spring magentas and yellow greens and violets.
Of course, I wanted to work with daffodils. I cut new daffodil foliage stencils and had a 20” x 48” panel made knowing that Daffodils from Nursery Window would represent a wide ground level view. A happy variety of daffodil yellows interacts with ground greens and neutrals.
From the nursery window, while Luke and I were waiting for the daffodils to bloom, we could see a good bit of green – rich evergreens like magnolias, cedars and pines, cool green bulb foliage, and the greens of resurrection fern shriveling toward olivey brown when the air was dry then bursting back to full saturation after a drink of rain. These are the colors in Native Garden, the painting you see first when you enter the gallery.
Years ago, I walked through Oxford with a friend when spring gardens were in full colorful, delightful bloom. We went from there to her family’s farm in Como to ride horses. I was surprised to find that the colors there were subdued compared to what we had just seen in town. Early spring was much more subtle in the woods and pastures.
While Native Garden reaches toward that subtlety, Bright Spring is about the bright, brilliant, super-saturated color of spring garden flowers. This triptych reached almost completely across my studio shed where my stencils live and where I spray paint. In an effort to balance its shapes and colors, I placed stencils before beginning the underpainting.
Motherhood means that my studio time is divided into shorter slivers. Sometimes, mixing colors, spraying a layer, and walking away from a painting was a good thing. I often returned knowing just what I wanted to do next. Working on this scale with short slivers of time was a bit daunting. The painting kept going and going and going, but in the end, it was a celebration.
One thing I like about spraying paint is that the layers do not completely cover each other. I mix distinct colors and pour them into small pump spray bottles. Memphis Professional Imaging recently scanned a watercolor for me at a very high resolution, and I got to see what I had sensed for years. When you zoom in really, really close, the spray pattern forms a network of tiny dots. In the top layers of the painting, most of the dots come from the last color I sprayed but there are enough gaps that colors from the previous layers peak through, too. I like the way that this makes the colors relate to each other. Our eyes mix adjacent colors the way we perceive distinctly colored threads woven together.
The thickness of the paint adds another structural quality to the way colors relate. My silhouette stencils are made out of paper, but as I have used them, they have gotten thicker and thicker with layers of paint. This sometimes makes shapes appear softer and sometimes makes actual, sharp, low-relief edges.
This quality reminds me of a description of bluebird blue in Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds that has stuck with me for years.
“In nature, blue is unusual in part because vertebrates never evolved the ability to make or use blue pigments. The deep electric blue an eastern bluebird carries on its back is an example of what scientists call a structural color. It’s generated by light interacting with the three-dimensional arrangement of keratin in the birds’ feathers.”
Finally, a few very sincere thank yous –
Thank you to David Lusk Gallery
Thank you for doing what you do so well. Congratulations on thirty years.
I first became aware of DLG through my LSU professor Michael Crespo. Before the gallery van would pick up his paintings for a show, Michael would invite the graduate painting students to have wine and cheese in his studio and look at the work. Even then, I recognized that DLG represented uncommon excellence.
I respect the artists you represent, and I am honored to be a part of this community. I appreciate the market you have built for my work, and I am thankful to be able to focus on making art - another dream-come-true.
Thank you to my parents
Thank you for coming to Oxford every other week since Luke was born and working to keep our household running. I realized long ago that my successes largely reflected the supportive people around me especially my very devoted parents.
Thank you to my son Luke
You are a joy.
Thank you to my husband Thad
Thank you for making another beautiful studio film for me – mostly in the middle of the night.
Twenty years ago when we met, even though the way ahead seemed to be unfolding very mysteriously, and even though it didn’t always seem we were headed in the same direction, I sensed that I could live into who I was made to be with you.
When we were dating, Thad wrote me a poem that ended with a promise to “hold [me] like seas hold ships and starlight.”
And you have. Thank you for holding me in the most practical ways. I’m thinking of your long list of household duties and all the things you do for the family. And, thank you for living with me in a world of art and ideas – for the playful, creative, dreaming, shimmering like light-on-water parts of our life. Both are so good for me and for my work and for our family.
Thanks to all of you for being here. I’m happy to answer questions.
