Groundsite Image Gallery
Journey of Death, by Carrie Swim
Artist: Fine Arts, KU
Season: Fall
Medium: oil on panel
Height: 28.000"
Width: 38.000"
Keywords: cemetery, Jefferson County, Perry
The natural environment has remained a constant theme in my work since my first memories of making art. Although my artistic background includes a very little ìen plein airî landscape painting, it does include a strong preference for creating from real life. From our first day outside as a class, I found nature speaking into the reality of my soul. I found what seemed to be an old friend that might take my work to new dimension of artistic and spiritual realization. Within me holds a mandate to use a painting process that responds intuitively to unexpected occurrences in the mind, soul, nature, people, and paint. I applied wet mediums to canvas, worked, thought, drew, wrote, and then painted some more.
Writing about what I saw and could not see, awakened an understanding of the poetry of the land! Nature is sobering to the mind and spirit through its beauty and ever-present reality of death and decay. Revelations of color, pondering truth, and exclamations of life and death flooded me. As I awakened to the experience of landscape painting, I also found new revelations in the experience of painting manís constructed and even destroyed vista. For example, a simple mound of dirt and ruble had potential for life and expression amidst houses under construction, as nearby trees and bushes were growing and consuming feces. No restriction to expression of both external and internal realities could remain.
With a refined creative spirit, informed mind, and excitement filling all within, I look forward to the next rising sun. What will my next experience in nature and manís constructed landscape unlock?
A fire lights within my soul as my pencil explores the contents of the landscape. I am captivated by the visual content before and heart awakened to know the life and history this land once held — somehow I long and perhaps am apart of it.
Judy’s Land, Oct 2nd 2009.Revelation of the poetry the land holds,
I stand deeply intrigued by the play of horizontal and vertical movement of the tall grass stretched skyward while flowers dance amidst a vista that stretches outward.
The wind blows across the field.
As the towers of grass follow its commanding flow, blades bend down along the earth’s floor to later return to its upright position.
The dance continues.
The slopes of earth fall and rise. All reach to and evoke recognition of the unseen hand, leading the dance, calling to the deep within.
The dance continues, and so I join.
Color Contemplations
“What are my favorite colors?” Someone asks.
I respond: (This is a stream of thoughts, ideas, likes — expressed naturally, honestly, and simply)
When I think about the colors in this world I like I think about my connection with what happens when the summer first begins to turn to fall.
I see exclamation marks of color that are hidden at a glance.
When found, the pigments of orange read, golden yellow, soft pinks, screams its secrets!
The noise overwhelms.
In such turning I see living memories held.
Colors foreshadow the further change to come.
Cold stands unyieldingly around the corner, with the promise of spring to follow.
I respond to the color of a sunrise that holds promises renewed with each new day —
a sunrise upon which joy rides where sorrow once remained.
I love warm variations of red melting into blue.
Warmth consuming a picture: plain and cool contrasting.
And by all means a vibrant red — the color of life, blood, death, royalty, passion.
The Cemetery Near Perry On Ferguson Rd:
Life is but a mere breath! Life and death lie literally with in earth’s floor before me. The sun sets in the background. All the tombstones do not seem to argue against such reality of death. They sit and follow the slope down towards the path reaching to the setting sun.
“Behold, you have made man but a few mere hand-breaths…” Ps.39: 5
The Quarry
A new planet in a familiar land, nothing soft, growth however emerges amidst rubble. Something in my heart is stirred — I feel a connection I cannot audibly express. Then I read:
“Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.” Isaiah 50
Carrie Swim, 12-19-09