A Book Project-“Mountain Meditation”
I was invited to participate in an artist book exhibition at the Durango Art Center that opens tomorrow, July 9. Durango has a number of excellent artists who make “one of a kind” artist books and I was honored to be among those selected. I have been drawn to this area because of the intimacy with the viewer and my long term love affair with books. The combination of words, materials, and images provides many possibilities not on offer by the individual constituents alone. In the last months I have been writing more prose, primarily short stories, about my print images but this is my first effort combining poetry and mezzotint images. The production aspects of these books is not yet comfortable for me-too many craft skills I never mastered. So, this book took way more hours to get accomplished than it should have-the art is long, I suppose. I have excerpted the required “artist statement” and the poem. Hope you enjoy
My life and books have been inexorably paired. From childhood, books have, more or less, provided the major pathway for exploring and expanding my imagination; escapes; my education; the knowing of beauty; and ultimately, some understanding of what it means to be fully human, created in the image of God. As an artist, the making of books has allowed me to meld the symbols of image, words, and materials to provide artifacts of meaning and exploration.
Creating this book was a year-long adventure, a meditation really, that started with the almost indescribable beauty found in the wildflower covered meadows of the San Juan Mountains. The emotional intensity of that experience was followed by the bittersweet winter of memory-the remembered joys mixed with the sadness of absence. This book was the result of that reflection; a creative adventure containing equal parts of walking through those meadows and the process of reforming the materials. The engraving of the mezzotint plates, the careful choosing of words, and the fashioning of the materials served to remind and praise the past and also imagine the possibilities for the future. My hope as an artist is that this book will fire your imagination and bring you a new knowing of beauty.
Soli Deo gloria
FLOWERS OF GRACE
I cannot quite catch my breath,
When first I see those high mountain flowers;
Their short bursting anthems startle
An unnamed longing and my songs of content.
Standing in columbine and lupine I find anew
The seduction of love that first taught desire
A gift least expected, and with my considerable
embarrassment, unearned.
Sometimes in winter I fear forgetting,
their dear blues and yellows
Or worse, cursing my dwindling hope.
But longing whispers, in the petals and pages
These are my promises, down payments really
For all I hold for you.
I loved you before you were, and long after
these beautiful echos are gone, I will love you more;
Revel in the longing, lean into it’s richness
Flowers and hope are my gift, and a promise