I’m just back from a flying camping trip to the Asheville area. Last night I sat by a river reading until all the daylight was gone. This morning I woke up in my dew covered tent the moment the sun appeared. The day started with a walk around a lake. The lake was nearly covered with blooming pink waterlilies. In the small spaces where the lilies didn’t grow Canada Geese swam with their young. The goslings had such an attitude–like any teenager– I know what I’m doing. Back off. I don’t need you. Or maybe that was just my perception. I was on a trip to take my youngest to orientation for college. That was certainly the attitude in my home and in my car over the course of the last few days/weeks/months. I could just feel it in the body language of the goslings. Such insouciance.
The day before, I had removed the thorn from my side, dropping him off at college. Feeling a good deal lighter, I treated myself to a trip back in time. I embarked on my own little excursion, to places where I had friends and happy times when I was in college. It was a lovely, tender experience seeing those places through my older eyes. Though much had changed there was, about those places, the same important quality of light, of freshness in the air. The tree canopy is so huge and never-ending there that the air is always fresh. The air and the wildflowers are perhaps the best characteristics of that place. At a stoplight a dragonfly landed on my windshield that was the biggest one I’d ever seen– probably 6 inch wingspan. My immediate thought was “helicopter on the windshield”.
Among the highlights of my little journey was the pistachio muffin I enjoyed for breakfast, and a trip through the Blue Spiral Gallery. I am always inspired by my trips through the Blue Spiral. It is a destination as rich as any museum. There I always see some of the best artists North Carolina can claim, and am entranced by the imaginative use of media, the interpretive leaps, the technical mastery. Today’s mind-bending experience was a book-makers exhibition. White gloves were provided for the viewer, so one could leaf through the complex volumes. I was mesmerized by the craftsmanship, the raw edgy imagination in evidence. I remember best the volume that included linocuts, mixed with rubber stamped images. The key image was a wolf in a forest, all black white and gray. Wolf pages were interspersed with other pages bearing flowing rhythmical images in color that appeared to be more like water. Had I thought that I would write about it later I would have taken more time to make notes to be more faithful to what I saw. Instead I have to write more intuitively and less factually. I felt fed by what I saw in The Blue Spiral. It’s a feast—three stories of wonderful art. I always stop to look at the work by Will Henry Stevens, who seems like our native John Marin, his eyes as captivated by the North Carolina landscape as my own.
Now I’m back in the Piedmont with a bit of the cool mountain breeze still blowing through my soul. I hope tomorrow I will carry some of the energy of the last two days into the studio.