Daily Painting

Imagining Morocco

"From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there).  And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumberous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not yet realized but turning in their darkness, catching here and there a spark of light.”

 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

 My book of sketches, Imagining Morocco, begins with the above quotation.  You can now download the book for your ipad/iphone or purchase a hard copy here.  

 

"all the blasts of doubt"

"Always...before exchanging the flow of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy precipice and exposed unprotected, to all the blasts of doubt."

During my trip to Missouri I had the time to luxuriate in "To the Lighthouse".  My copy is a loan from my friend and  poet Sarah.   I am floored by how eloquently Virginia Woolf describes the feeling of vulnerability and the raging cacophony of threats from within that usually assail one before settling in to make art.  (I also like how I come away from her writing feeling that I have permission to go bananas with run on sentences and adjectives, though that may be a burden for my readers.)  

Paintings #s408 and 409 are 6"x6", oil on masonite, available here and here, respectively.  That is the very last of our pears this season.