About the show titled “Beached”

I’m sure that most artists are familiar with a pressured rush to complete their latest work in time for an up-coming show.  I have experienced that pressure to an even higher degree;  an unfortunate confluence of circumstances in the past two years has sidelined me from a rigorous approach to creating art.  You might ask how did I cope with that incapacity and how have I managed to put on a show of work mostly new or unseen before.  With nothing but ‘free’ time on my hands, I had spent those many months mentally running through all  possibilities of work that I would be proud to show.

Wall art is far from the only creative work I do.   My 3-dimensional work is in the form of silver and copper jewelry, some of it is expressly sculptural as the Repousse pieces in which I literally push the silver or copper metal to its finished shape as though the metal was clay.  In other periods (of incapacity) when painting was out of reach for me, I have also designed and fashioned wearable jewelry made of pearls and mineral beads.  So too my garden has been a labor of love and obsession for the past 30 or more years and I am sharing it in photographs on the Gallery walls.  And yes, I have gotten back to my 3rd floor studio and have quickly learned to paint while seated!

 Thinking of myself as a ‘beached whale’ led me to consider metaphors of the term “beached”.  I have made paintings and drawings relating to many of these terms: stuck, grounded, thwarted, forlorn, bereft and unable to move either literally, as in the  beached and stranded sea life or, metaphorically, as of persons in the throes of the emotions described.