Art

“This sweet Labrador is Minnie, Tabitha’s best friend. We introduced them when Tabitha was a baby cheetah, and we raised Minnie alongside Tabitha to help tame her. Whatever Minnie does, Tabitha wants to do……… While the zookeeper began sharing facts about cheetahs born into captivity, my older daughter, Tish, nudged me and pointed to Tabitha. There, in that field, away from Minnie and the zookeepers, Tabitha’s posture had changed. Her head was high, and she was stalking the periphery, tracing the boundaries the fence created. Back and forth, back and forth, stopping only to stare somewhere beyond the fence. It was like she was remembering something. She looked regal. And a little scary. Tish whispered to me, “Mommy. She turned wild again.”  Glenon Doyle

I’m posting the first painting, I’ve just completed, of a couple of paintings focused around a dancer theme that I’ve been working on. The figure in this one was partly inspired by Edgar Degas’ famous bronze sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. The first art and artists we find or are introduced to in childhood or adolescence usually leave a more lasting impression. In her book, Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing, Natalie Goldberg referring to her first exposure to art through her aunt writes: “From then on, I began to notice paintings— in books in the public library, even hanging in the beauty parlor, and in the waiting room when my father consulted a lawyer. The world of painting sprang up to illuminate my world.” These fisrt memories of art linger on.  Pablo Picasso’s Girl on a Ball or Young Acrobat on a Ball, a 1905 painting which he produced during his Rose period that depicts a group of travelling circus performers, is another painting that left its impression on me when I was young. This spring I have returned to this “early internal art gallery” and through my own painting I feel a sort of transformation of  memory material is taking place.