the I inside

Now as I continue to work in the studio it’s apparent how much my residency in Iceland has changed me. Have barriers to my natural expression begun to melt away?  Maybe I am not so much changed as more permeable, more visible to myself, more accessible.  Anyway, I am aware of an eye inside me that has begun to open.

Here is a poem that I look at often.  It hangs above my work bench at the Library Company, a reminder that there is a great world inside me, inside of every human.

Is my soul asleep?

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work in the night stopped?
And the water-
wheel of thought, is it going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
~Antonio Machado

So this is what I’m seeing right now, an imagined mountain, loosely based on a sketch of some formations just East of Hveragerdi, in the South of Iceland.

 

These recent 16 x 20 monoprints, are my first full-color prints (besides some dabbling efforts that never really “took”, and I abandoned)  I’m still working through the mountain forms trying to come closer to my imagined ideal, and I am beginning to play with the forms of the shadows on the massive mountain flanks.

 

This is one, below, is from the great Icelandic painter Kjarval.  I’m not the only one to see figures in the mountain forms and shadows.