A YEAR OF LISTENING

​I am so thankful that I can express my thoughts with images and words.  The past two years have been years of other peoples’ words filling my head as they talk of  politics.  While I need to stay aware and active in the health of our country these social media blitzes have made it hard to hear my own voice. 
 
I have always needed a place to go where I can hear my real self, that wiser, more innocent voice I hold inside.  Sometimes an image, more than words holds the feeling of peacefulness and patience I am waiting for.   From this need has come a continuing series of  paintings of women who are listening.  The piece above was the first and is called LISTENING FOR ADVICE.   Creating art allows me to let myself think and to hear my own thoughts instead of the thoughts that bubble up in an effort to accept the voice of a larger, more vocal group.  
 
I showed the first three  pieces in the listening series a year ago.  I felt good when I looked at them,  but wondered, as artists do, if others would connect to what I felt inside.  They all sold with orders for prints and continue to sell.  But the real gift has been meeting the people they speak to, and finding a universal need we share, a need to honor our own thoughts and our own visions and to wait until they are clear to us.  The voice may come inside our outside of a church, in the forest or marsh, or in the foliage of the jungle.  But these paintings are really a reminder to my own self, a reminder that what I really believe is audible if I will be still and alone long enough to listen.