Over the bustling past six weeks I have been intentionally carving time out to paint. During the summer, when I have two art fairs per month it can be easy to slip into the mindset of production over creativity. This year I wanted to stay mindful of what I felt was truly inspiring me over what I guessed people might want to see at these events. I have found that my relationship to inspiration and creativity is just that, a relationship. It requires thoughtful consideration, deep listening, and a willingness to show up with curiosity over judgment.

This week I have been finishing up staining and varnishing frames, matting these new paintings and tucking them behind glass. As I finished, I sat back and saw them as a whole, realizing they’re telling a story I had not even seen until now. The story of summer.

I catch myself saying often that I just want to slow things down, especially this time of year. I have also always moved at a slower pace, naturally. Anyone close to me knows that I hate to be rushed and I often find myself lingering over moments, as if attempting to keep them a little longer than they’re meant to be kept.

In this series of paintings, you’ll see rising moons and setting suns, hazy horizons, and summer blooms. In each painting there was a part of me aching to slow down time that is fleeting, escaping me, slipping through my fingers. Capturing a feeling through gradient skies and sprays of quaking foliage.

I am almost painfully aware that the moon is only truly full for a night, that the summer solstice only lasts a day, that the Mock Orange is only fragrant while she’s blooming and the rambling roses poke their pink heads out for a matter of weeks and are soon gone.

I find myself in a juxtaposition between wanting to fuse myself to a moment and the comfort that next month, I’ll watch the moon fill out into a great pearl once again, that the roses will bloom even more fully next year, and that flora and fauna do not wish for a perpetual summer solstice, that there is rest and rejuvenation in the shortening of days.

I am learning always to soften my body into this human dance, away from the delusion that I am separate when in actuality, I am constantly in motion, a cycle, spiraling in and spiraling out, deepening into being, and tumbling through a passing of days.

I hope you enjoy these eight new paintings and that they remind you of your place in the cycle of all things, that you are woven into the fabric of time, that it is your mission to see yourself in everything around you.

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A Passing of Days

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Next Year, Rambling Rose