Author: Elizabeth Derby

Artists-turned-activists typically use their work to amplify awareness about an issue. Increased publicity, the thinking goes, inspires action in the field.

But poet Amelia Williams has found a way to leverage art as a direct blocking and delay tactic in the fight against fracked gas pipelines and compressor stations.

“In 2014, when we learned about the prospect of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline coming through Nelson County and other counties and wild areas in Virginia, I wanted to do something,” Williams says.

The poet and eco-artist, who has a Ph.D. in English from UVA, lives on Shannon Farm Community, an intentional community in Nelson County with 500 acres owned in common by the people who live there. “This big property has beautiful wetland areas and open meadows and communal organic gardens, and they would have been plowed through by the pipelines,” she says, referring to one of Dominion Resources’ proposed routes for its planned 550-mile natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to North Carolina.

“I chose a lifestyle that isn’t about money and things,” says Williams. “It’s about being here, on this land, living with other people together. Something that’s hard to touch on with numbers and dollars is what happens to your heart when your place is ripped away from you. There are birds that are dependent on deep woods environment. What happens to the wood thrush, the whippoorwill, the barn owl, when these trees are gone? What happens to me? What kind of spiritual desolation do I experience?”

She says that many members of Shannon Farm are working against Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline, not just because it threatens to “carve an enormous swath” through their backyard but because pipelines are a regional and statewide issue.

“Natural gas pipelines, in general, are a very bad idea,” she says. “How they leak methane, how environmental protections are often ignored by state-based departments, how rivers and streams and well water is polluted. We also learned about how energy companies can earn money from a pipeline even when the ‘need’ for it is not really substantiated.”

So Williams’ interest piqued when she read about Canadian artist Peter von Tiesenhausen, who waylaid a mining company when he registered his 800 acres as intellectual property in the form of land art.

According to an article in the Cantech Letter, von Tiesenhausen explained that any disturbance to the top six inches of his property would constitute a copyright violation—and, ideally, a prohibitively expensive legal battle that dissuades installation of a pipeline.

“I’m not a legal scholar, and I didn’t know if there was any precedent for doing this kind of thing in the U.S., but I thought I would imitate it here,” Williams says.

The lifelong poet reviewed her work and found a large number of poems with roots in Nelson County. Next, she set about creating sculptural containers and assemblages that would integrate her writing with the landscape.

“I wanted to make land art like the projects of Andrew Goldsworthy, whose works are intended to fade back into the landscape because they are created out of natural elements like twigs and leaves,” she says.

Ultimately, Williams made 16 different containers out of local biodegradable materials, including clay bowls, cedar boxes, felted bags and fire-hardened bamboo. Community members donated many of these materials, all of which hold up well in rain, snow and the humidity of Virginia summers.

She sealed the cases with local beeswax and placed each piece in the location referred to in its poem. “This included hauling two of the pieces up to the trees in an area we call the Beech Grove, which is on a ridgeline, because those trees would have been taken down by the pipeline,” she says.

As soon as the project was installed in the field, she had a documentary photographer take pictures of each piece, which she submitted as a collective eco-art trail for copyright registration with the U.S. Copyright Office.

“As a maker you own the copyright as soon as you make it, but you register that copyright if you anticipate some kind of legal issue,” she says, which is an important distinction for artists-turned-activists.

Because land art derives its meaning from its precise location, an eminent domain lawyer would likely recognize that you can’t just put it somewhere else and maintain its value.

So does the theory work in practice?

Hard to say, because no precedent exists and Williams’ work hasn’t been put to the test. Though she’s collecting examples of successful art-as-environmental-protest tactics, she points to the fact that most battles are won by fights on multiple fronts.

“When we learned that the preferred route [of the pipeline] was now not going to run across this land, I felt it essential to keep up the fight to help other landowners and other people,” she says. “I also don’t trust Dominion; that they won’t move it back.”

Williams wants to inspire others to consider land-art protests of their own. “The best-case scenario is that the energy companies wake up and realize the future lies in renewables, and if they want to do their shareholders a favor, they will move in that direction with all of their money and their R&D and their publicity,” she says.

All proceeds from Walking Wildwood Trail: Poems and Photographs, a book of poetry and photography documenting her project, benefit Friends of Nelson and Wild Virginia. The significance, she hopes, reaches everyone.

“The words of poets speak to people’s hearts, she says. “It allows them to figure forth their own attachments to the trees and the water and the land.”

Related Links:

May 24, 2016: A win for Nelson pipeline opponents

Artist Elsabe Dixon doesn’t remember how she learned to raise silkworms. But after she successfully encouraged 8,000 of them to spin silk in the hollows of her experimental living sculptures, the South African native began to wonder.

“I did a little bit of research and realized that I’m a descendant of the French Huguenots, and they have this strange ritual that they pass down to their kids,” Dixon says. “When you’re about 2 years old, you’re handed a silkworm in a box, and you’ve got to name it. When you turn 13 it becomes a way to prove that you can enter adulthood by being responsible towards this very tiny creature.”

She’d always felt “a little on the odd side” in her relationship with insects, so Dixon was delighted to realize she wasn’t alone when she made the switch from silkworms to bees.

“There’s a whole population out there that’s obsessed with insects but they never show it,” she says. “With the bee community, there’s a sacred stance. In an apiary, you’re going through an agricultural ritual, but at the same time you’re thinking very deeply about philosophy and history and the traditions that have gone before.”

Dixon’s latest work is featured in “A Consideration of Bees,” a group exhibition hosted by Chroma Projects. The show includes eight regional artists whose work calls attention to bees as objects of artistic inspiration and, in some cases, as quiet signifiers of environmental breakdown.

From the imaginative figure of a solitary bee in flight, to detailed enlargements of bee faces, to the artful recounting of classic colony behavior versus that which jeopardizes their existence, each work invites viewers to examine what’s truly at stake if we lose them.

Robin Braun says she creates paintings with a luminous, storybook quality. “I can make bees into a character for the viewer, something that they can relate to,” she says. “I very much enjoy the tiny world and dramas that unfold in the microcosm but which we are oblivious to as we rush around in our own, larger world.”

Washington, D.C.-based Mary Early offers an abstract, structural form made from beeswax, while Matt Lively provides a number of “bee-cycles”—fanciful paintings of bees with wheels, clustered and buzzing through the frame.

For engineer and artist Blake Hurt, bees are “a net to collect imagination.” His collages layer technical illustration of gears and apple corers into bee bodies. Jason McLeod takes a similarly mechanical approach, building wasp bodies out of silver and gold. In “A Consideration of Bees,” these tiny sculptures pose atop found abandoned wasp nests.

“Bees are astonishing creatures and bring to mind metaphors for our own life experience,” says Suzanne Stryk via e-mail. “Bees are both wild and domesticated, as are we. They live in societies, as do we. They dance to show their hive mates where the good flowers are. They make honey and they sting.”

The artist, who paints bees on mirror panels, points to the depth of our symbiosis by adding that honeybees “are absolutely essential as pollinators of so many of our crop plants.”

Bees are the canaries in the coal mine, says Richard Knox Robinson, in a voiceover during his award-winning experimental film, The Beekeepers.

The short documentary, which plays on a loop in the gallery, features an interview with commercial beekeeper David Hackenberg, the discoverer of Colony Collapse Disorder, which wipes out entire colonies at twice the normal rate.

During the day, Robinson explains, bees fly for miles, returning to their hives laced with the dust of pesticides and other pollutants. For this reason, they act as on-the-ground indicators of the wellness of the planet.

It’s the subject of Dixon’s most recent work, “Living Hive: A Sculptural Platform for Collective Action,” a collection of drawings and sculptures created in conjunction with German Perilla’s Pollen Collection Project.

Perilla, who works with Dixon at George Mason University, collects honeybee pollen to evaluate toxin sources and levels in an effort to identify the contaminants that cause disorders like CCD.

Dixon’s drawings detail the microscopic structures of pollen, while her sculptures will be built in conjunction with bees. Using her drawings as a model, she uses a 3-D printer to create a multipart sculpture. Each piece fits inside the top super [stack] of a standard beehive, in apiaries from Fairfax to Danville along the Route 29 corridor.

She says these layers of industrial technology, handmade materials and public examination echoes the social problem—and its potential solution.

“Bees are a representation of a broader issue,” Dixon says. “We have gone through a consumer period where our main objectives have been to establish markets. Now we’ve really got to backtrack and see what we have in the hand.”

Pollen, she adds, is an indicator of that larger issue of pollution. “Our environment is tainted with things we have taken out of the ground, our oil products. All these plastics, we’re living with them. They’re not going to go away. So how do we deal with pesticides and pollutants? How do we separate the good from the less tainted? Because everything is tainted now.”

Dixon says she’s seen a wide variety of reactions from bees presented with her sculpture. “The country bees are a little more aggressive and assertive,” she says. “But as soon as you enter the city, [their behavior] becomes very volatile because we’ve got to deal with all kinds of pesticides.”

She hopes her work inspires discussion among those concerned about sustainable agriculture. “Rural Virginia has a lot to give northern Virginia, and vice versa,” she says. “It’s about different people coming together and talking about stuff that they need to be talking about.”

In high school, playwright Samantha Macher staged a revolt.

“We got a new drama teacher my senior year who canceled the spring musical because he just couldn’t figure out how to use any of us,” says the self-proclaimed theater nerd. “I wound up writing, directing and producing the spring musical. I was like, ‘Screw this.’”

That surge of defiance resurfaced in college when, as an undergraduate at UVA, Macher found herself suffering through a slew of pre-med classes. “I thought I might be a doctor, but I was failing and miserable and I hated everybody,” she says.

“I remember looking at the course catalog, seeing playwriting and thinking, ‘Oh, remember when you wrote that play in high school? Maybe it would make you happy to do something like that.’”

Macher recalls one professor in particular who helped her launch her creative career: Doug Grissom. “I don’t think I was the best writer he had taught,” she says. “Not by any stretch of the imagination. But he was like, ‘Okay, I guess we got to start looking for grad schools for you.’”

She went on to receive her master’s degree and was the youngest graduate ever from the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University. Since then, she’s had more than 20 productions, both in the U.S. and abroad, including those of her monologue, “To the New Girl,” which benefited domestic abuse and family service centers in Virginia, and WAR BRIDE, which won the StageSceneLA Best World Premiere Play award in 2012.

The playwright-in-residence for the SkyPilot Theatre Company in Los Angeles credits her progress to the support of mentors like Grissom. “In pre-med there was no ambiguity,” she says. “There was no space to fail. Whereas I always felt safe and comfortable bringing something crazy into Doug’s class. You didn’t have to worry about being embarrassed or if it was right. It just was, and he helped you tell the story you wanted to tell.”

And now her one-time professor has become her director: Grissom leads the UVA drama department’s production of Macher’s play, The Arctic Circle (and a recipe for Swedish pancakes).

“I wrote the first draft when I was 23, for a course at [Hollins] where you had to write a new play every single week,” she says. “With the help of Doug, it’s grown about 30 pages and it’s gotten a lot funnier. That’s what a good director will do for you.”

A good director helps a playwright hone in on what matters most, sharpening intention and desire to anchor characters that otherwise exist merely to further a plot.

“Especially when you’re writing something quickly, you have a tendency to skim over the parts that make [characters] human,” says Macher. “Over the course of workshops and productions, you figure out what the humanity is of each of those characters. You want the actors to feel like they have something fun to do, a whole narrative to explore.”

In the case of Arctic Circle, Macher explains this maturity gap by way of her main character, Ellen.

At first writing, Ellen moved from being a teenager to a college student to a 40-year-old married adult. Working with Grissom and the actors at UVA, Macher was able to fill in a missing piece.

“I wound up writing a bunch of scenes where she explores career passions and failed relationships with online dates and speed dates, a lot of these things that happen in your mid-20s,” she says. “At the time I wrote it, I hadn’t experienced that. Now that I’m 30, I’ve actually lived a little bit more and have more insight into what that’s like.”

This development was critical for Arctic Circle, which tells the story of a woman who is in a troubled marriage and travels through time, space and Sweden to figure out what went wrong.

Ellen’s exploration of previous relationships (and how that is contributing to the downfall of her marriage) “doesn’t sound like an especially funny topic,” Macher says, “but it’s got a lot of humor.”

In fact, the playwright says she never intended the show to be a comedy. “I’m about to admit how painfully un-self-aware I am, but I wrote it as a drama,” she says. “I had no idea it wasn’t a drama until I had a first reading in Roanoke a year after I wrote it. Everyone was laughing hysterically, and I’m like, ‘oops.’”

Apparently, the humor wasn’t lost on UVA’s drama department, which selected it as a part of its 2015-2016 season. For Macher, though, it was a show like many others—the dramatic telling of stories she calls “truthful,” but it’s not autobiographical.

“When you write, you draw from—not the experiences exactly. You just try to find moments where the feelings are real, where you can feel something breaking apart,” says Macher, who experienced her own divorce while writing the show.

Of course, that’s the point of theater, the force that unites pre-med hopefuls, seasoned professors and audience members together in darkened playhouses.

“You’re taking a big risk exposing the honest parts of your life,” Macher says. “It’s scary, but it allows the audience to explore those moments in their lives, too. Your stories intertwine for a time.”

Ever notice how a small shift in perspective can transform the way you think about your job, relationship, insert-your-life-struggle-here?

Liz Rodda is a mixed-media artist who sharpens viewers’ abilities to reframe what they see by partnering two totally unrelated works in a mash-up of videos, sound and sculpture.

Unlike a traditional collage artist who combines varied media to build a single, unified work, Austin-based Rodda strives to maintain the integrity of each freestanding concept. That juxtaposition triggers a dialogue between the works as well as in the minds of its viewers.

Consider “The Vow,” a work in Rodda’s current exhibit, “Two Kinds of Luck,” on display at Second Street Gallery through the end of the month. In it, a neon-green yoga mat drapes casually across the floor, one end anchored by a silver-gray stone. Read the description and you discover the plaster rock has a bottle of Elizabeth Taylor’s perfume, Forever, embedded in it.

It’s a puzzle, all right. What’s the connection? Are we reflecting on what it means to find permanence on the social and spiritual planes? Our craving for immortality and the futility of fame? Or does it simply suggest that women who make it through yoga classes without a single drop of sweat disturbing their perfect hairdos also have perfume in their veins?

Beats me. But asking the questions to make new connections is the point of the exercise.

“I like contradictions and unexpected pairings,” Rodda writes in an e-mail to C-VILLE. “Context is significant in my work as a result. For example, placing one video beside another changes the way we see both. My goal isn’t to make something greater than the individual elements that are combined, but to see them differently through association.”

Influenced by psychology, philosophy and pop culture, Rodda’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions all over the country.

“I tend to borrow from a lot of different genres and styles—I draw from minimalism, pop culture, music and movies,” she writes. “My goal is to effectively blend genres and styles together when possible. This kind of mixing mimics my process—I spend a lot of time collecting video clips, images and objects and then pairing different elements to create some kind of tension.”

She spends the majority of her time collecting material she can work with and shuffling it around. “Sometimes I shoot video, but more often I use pre-existing video and audio I find online,” she writes. “The same goes with sculpture—sometimes I make objects, but much more frequently I find myself repurposing.”

As an example, she cites a video in her current show at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in San Antonio. “‘Turn Your Face Toward The Sun’ consists of scanned images from modern furniture magazines that pan and zoom slowly over time. The audio is made up of a girl chewing gum and whispering positive affirmations,” she writes. “The audio and video content are really different but somehow work together to give one another a new sense of direction and purpose.”

Rodda’s interest in teasing out relationships between ideas seemingly at odds with each other—really, making work that succeeds in spite of itself—is a product of her self-led exploration of her psyche as an artist.

“I studied English in college and then started making art in grad school directly after,” she writes. “It was a steep learning curve since I knew very little about contemporary art and had minimal art-making experience.”

After school was over, Rodda says, she met an artist named Frank Wick and began to zero in on the type of artist she wanted to become.

“Meeting Frank was pivotal for me not only because I later married him, but also because he showed me it was possible to take your work seriously without being too serious. He introduced me to John Waters and Slavoj Žižek, both of whom have influenced me at times.”

Her sources of creative input run the artistic gamut because Rodda is an assistant professor at Texas State University, School of Art and Design. As a result, she is exposed to and inspired by a wide range of works that she “might not make time for otherwise.”

But, of course, the real goal is that shift in perspective—a gift she gives her students whether they enjoy it or not.

“What I like best about teaching is getting to know individual students and exposing them to works and ideas that I know they will love,” Rodda writes. “At the same time, it is rewarding to show work that is challenging and harder to like.”

Contemplation is having a resurgence in the popular consciousness these days, with mindfulness festival studios, pop-up meditation groups and even the University of Virginia’s own Contemplative Sciences Center. But for centuries, artists have practiced contemplation as a necessary companion of creation.

“A lot of artists working today like to define contemplativity broadly as a means of justifying or explaining their fixation on subjective creative interests,” writes local artist Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz in an email to C-VILLE Weekly. “However, for me it is very simple and objective: Contemplation is the remembrance of God.”

This strict definition aligns Mumtaz, whose interdisciplinary work incorporates collage, hand papermaking, silverpoint, miniature painting technique, textile design and other crafting practices with a long history.

“The contemporary art world tends to look down on traditional craft and draw a harsh line separating art from craft,” she says.

Although her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Europe, spirituality is the common denominator that connects her to makers the world over.

“[In Lahore] I started thinking more deeply about the status of traditional art in the modern world and the core values that defined art in the pre-modern, pre-colonial framework of the subcontinent,” says Mumtaz.

Here, she found, art existed primarily to honor the sacred. A textile that visualized and embodied spiritual principles of its culture was “as much an artwork as a miniature painting.”

It’s a welcome discovery for the woman who received her bachelor of arts from Yale and her master of fine arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, yet cites her artistic heroes as those from the history of craft rather than modern art.

For those of us uninitiated by graduate- level artistic training, it’s easy to believe that, like spirituality, creative legitimacy begins with the artist, not the chosen medium.

In Mumtaz’s case, she was heavily influenced by her mother’s self-taught work in archaic textile crafts. Mumtaz followed in her footsteps, working at the same living history museum and learning to weave on a loom that was nearly 300 years old. “Years later I am still fascinated by the ingenious inner geometry of traditional weaving,” she says.

As they say, God is in the details.

An artist-in-residence at New City Arts from October through the end of February, Mumtaz most recently developed these concepts through textile/collage hybrids, a technique that imitates the visual qualities of embroidery.

Her large-scale works are composed from handmade paper cutouts mounted onto woven paper silk sourced in India. They take the form of “a monumental khirqa, or initiatic cloak [of the Sufi chain of spirituality], which contains abstracted plant imagery referencing gardens of paradise.”

She decided to create these massive robes, which hang suspended in frames, after she noticed them appearing more frequently in textile museum collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. “The shape of the suspended robe reminds me of an apparition, or a figure that is both present and strangely absent, verging on the supernatural. I also love the mystical symbolism of the initiatic robe, which refers to spiritual transformation,” she says.

Mumtaz conducted additional research in the ancient holy city of Varanasi in India, where she traveled using a grant from the Lighton International Artists Exchange Program and was hosted by the Kriti Gallery residency program.

“This ancient holy city was calling me,” she says. “At first I was attracted to its identity as a living incarnation of Shiva and a city for the dead. Perched on the banks of the Ganges, Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the most important Hindu pilgrimage site in India and a place where many Hindus go to die.”

The city, she writes, was also the home of the poet/mystic Kabir, a weaver whose poems often reference the spiritual and cosmological symbolism of weaving. (For example: “God is the Master Weaver; the warp and woof of weaving are analogous to the vertical and horizontal axes of creation; they can also refer to the often very beautiful but deceptive ‘web’ of illusion (Maya) that we are caught in as created beings.”)

In Varanasi, Mumtaz met several weaving families dedicated to the creation of the Banarasi sari, “an extremely sophisticated handwoven silk brocade textile that has traditionally been produced by Muslim weavers.” Their work, she says, was “informed by their religious imagination.”

Mumtaz asserts that her artistic orientation and attention to divine archetypes “isn’t a religious practice in and of itself.” But in handloom workshops, following principles of joint-family apprenticeship, she found men “protecting and transmitting this very high craft form, which is increasingly threatened by the inhuman mechanization of the global contemporary textile trade.”

It was humbling and very moving, she says. “Most of their designs had been passed down through generations of workshop transmission, often from father to son.”

No doubt Mumtaz thinks of her mother. And so the line blurs between art and craft, religion and reflection. So creation and contemplation open a channel to the spirit that shapes us, no matter what we call it.

Art is food for the soul, as they say. So whether you and a date are carving a bit of indulgence into your weekday or celebrating Restaurant Week, take a break between mouthfuls to admire what’s on the walls.

At The Local, glossy brick props up the hallucinogenic work of Dave Moore, a Virginia artist born in Hampton and educated at Virginia Commonwealth University’s painting and printmaking department.

Bold, erratic shapes slash his off-white canvases. You get the sense of tightly wound tension and careful controlling of enormous energy. Streaks of black paint pull apart to reveal veins of swirling reds, melting layers of blue and neon green.

There’s something gritty and rhythmic about Moore’s work, so it’s no surprise that he’s also co-director of the rock department at WTJU 91.1. Under warm lights, his art pairs well with a fig sidecar and a paper cone loaded high with fries.

At rustic Italian favorite Tavola (co-owned by C-VILLE Weekly Arts Editor Tami Keaveny), the new craft cocktail bar offers sophisticated drinks, small plates and colorful ironwork by sculptor Lily Erb. The next time you need a place to cut a deal or murmur sweet nothings, wander into the sleek, dark space. Erb’s brightly painted steel sculptures pop in their mounting against cool gray walls, thin cords of undulating wire framed by rigid squares or loose circles, the largest of which stretches nearly 6′ across, lending movement to the scale of Tavola’s expanded interior.

Looking for a daytime pick-me-up? Grit Coffee Bar & Café on the Downtown Mall currently features canvas prints of Parisian street scenes in addition to its breakfast paninis and flavorful coffee drinks. Captured by local photographer Eric Kelley, some shots are tourist favorites like the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower at night, the foreground streaked by blurry, colorful lights. Others capture a sense of nostalgia for a city you may have never visited: cafe chairs clustered under an awning, a clutch of pedestrians crossing the street and shrugging into the wind, one woman’s face framed in pure misery by her umbrella whipped inside-out.

“We love having art in our shops because, one, we love supporting local artists and providing space for them to share their work with the community and, two, it’s fun to see how featuring different works changes the experience our customers have with our spaces,” says Grit co-owner Brandon Wooten.

The collection allows you to gingerly sip on your medium roast and believe, just for a moment, that you’re in a different city—one of lights, romance and imagination.

At lunchtime, stop by Baggby’s for fresh, well-prepared sammies, soups and salads. But before you dash out the door and back to the office, maybe nibble on your sandwich (or chocolate chip cookie, if we’re being honest) and allow yourself to be charmed by Jim Calhoun, the painter whose work dots the walls.

A residential painting contractor for 37 years, Calhoun infuses his impressionist work with confidence. Forests are conjured from blocks of color and strokes of tree limbs. Sailboats emerge with long masts, crackling water and a sky falling down in brushes of purple, blue and gold. Several paintings feature fishermen in streams, some with remarkable detail.

Art is everywhere at Orzo Kitchen & Wine Bar. While your eyes may be riveted by the housemade ravioli or Italian mac-n-cheese, look up between forkfuls. An enormous triptych of a brightly rendered Mediterranean countryside faces the galley kitchen; a large colorful rendering of Grecian rooftops hangs directly above chefs at work.

These joyful landscapes, vibrant with oranges, blues, yellows and greens, are the handiwork of Laura Wooten, a co-owner at Orzo along with her husband and two friends.

Wooten also fills an Etsy shop with paintings, drawings and illustrations which she calls “a close observation of the natural world with a fanciful overlay of memory and invention.” It’s the perfect complement to the sensory dining experience.

On the outskirts of the Downtown Mall, stop in at C&O Restaurant. The country French mainstay has its own separate gallery room, open during art exhibitions and available for events. But, in the small, charming dining room, you’ll find local scenes hung against white wainscoting. Each delicate painting by Edward Thomas evokes a familiar place: the dam at Woolen Mills, the hospital on Cherry Street, the UVA Corner.

Liz Broyles, C&O’s former bar manager, asked Thomas to curate a collection that came as close to downtown as possible. So here is the familiar rush of water in the springtime; a friendly sky shaded by violet and pink.

Thomas writes in his artist’s statement about painting from direct observation. “Thinking gets in the way and leads to artifice; painting what you think is there rather than what is there.”

This space between past and present, reality and impression, colors the lens not just of artists but of those of us who seek its company. The choice to eat and savor each flavor is the same hunger an artist feels. It’s the impulse to get lost in a sensory moment, to submerge into an act of beauty and let it linger on our tongue.