This day I am choosing to explore a phrase that has captured my attention, imagination and inspiration. From a poem by Marie Howe, she writes,

“...willing to be the sky again.” *

I am often shocked by poetry. Whole poems, or fragments, phrases containing whole ideas. Whole worlds there. With this phrase, one might wonder, are we thus willing?

Who might be willing? The creatures of the sky? Those who have passed beyond?

And what of this willingness. Is it transformational? Will our changed selves return from being the sky, taking on some mantle of obligation?

Will there be renewal?

A community revitalized?

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_{Bird Of The Universe 16, 24” diameter, oil paint, mica, Venetian plaster with 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel.}

The fact that a few words can open wide wonder in someone has always filled me with astonishment. I walk around wondering about (my) willingness to be the sky again. I sit with this conundrum, allowing the nebulous, uncertainty of its implications to distract me. Entirely.

When words enter us this way, with this unaccountable power, everything changes. Phrases we allow to burrow deeply into our layered consciousness open the corridor to belief. Can it be possible to undertake belief? A confidence, an idea, theory, understanding. It may be more important to ask the reverse, can it be possible to not believe?

Can it be possible to live without certainty, assurance, intuition, our imaginations. These questions may have an abstract, rhetorical feel. It seems we are living through a time when so many possibilities besiege us. Daily. Making quietude within the external roil can feel like, well, like a hermit determined to seal themselves into an inaccessible cave.

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Here is Howe’s poem.

What the Silence Said

By Marie Howe

Do you still believe in borders now?

Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.

You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires

travelled on wind you couldn’t see

wafting over the valley

and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill.

Did you not hear the animals howl and sing?

Or hear the silence of the animals no longer singing?

Now you know what it is to be afraid.

You think this is a dream? It is not

a dream. You think this is a theoretical question?

What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life?

The water grows clearer. The swans settle and float there.

Are you willing to take your place in the forest again? to become loam and bark

to be a leaf falling. from a great height. to be the worm who eats the leaf

and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky: are you

willing to be the sky again?

You think this lesson is

too hard for you You want the time-out to end. You want

to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends.

It can end now, but not in the way you imagine You know

the mind that has been talking to you for so long—the mind that

can explain everything? Don’t listen.

You were once a citizen of a country called I Don’t Know.

Remember the burning boat that brought you there? Climb in.

Copyright © 2021 by Marie Howe.

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We think of wilderness as an untamed place. Somewhere filled with creatures living their own umwelt. We can go there, few of us choose to live there for extended periods of time. The wilderness does not embrace our needs easily; it does not willingly supply the necessary ingredients for our equilibrium. Yet it is a thin place in that it allows for vibration and synergy, a kind of interpenetration from our conscious neighborhood to another. A somewhere else. Sometimes wilderness is similar to what we experience with artworks. Bewilderment, displacement, as though everything is foreign. It’s different.

“We are—our world is—transformation given shape. What we call the Earth is a stabilized field of fluctuating patterns, where organisms hatch and molt, die and are born across scales of time. Processual biology reveals life not as a collection of beings experiencing change but change itself. When we resist change, we resist life. Such is the paradox of living: None among us is the same vessel that set out to sea, and yet we remain. What is there to do but embrace the flow?” —Willow Defebaugh

Bird of the Universe 11, oil paint, Venetian plaster, mica, 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel.

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When we are in wilderness we are at the heart of what Defebaugh is talking about, transformation taking shape. It is this dynamic that gives artwork and the experience of it the powerful essence that it holds. Am I saying that artwork is a wilderness? Yes, I am. Presenting liminal, noumenal spaces in a place we enter through imagination, artworks offer the doorway of transformative experience. Where from and where to; that’s your job to name, your story to tell.

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Find Willow’s work here:

This house of consciousness is with us always. Yet it is becoming clear that our consciousness has an architecture. It has windows that provide a view beyond. It has doorways that open to other realms. There may be cracks in the foundation, there may be places where we can squeeze through, leaving our house of consciousness and entering somewhere else.

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Bird Of The Universe 3, 12” diameter, mica, Venetian plaster, black spray paint on yupo mounted on panel.

For the past several months I’ve been working in the artist book form. For a new project I’ve crafted a container that has a variety of pages. Much of the surfaces are patterned, none in a regular, repeatable pattern. Suminagashi (paper marbleizing) forms a basic approach to the visual contents of this book. As I work on it, I’ve been inviting ideas to gather.

Some are strong. They have volition, wishing to become something, fitting into a setting that activates them. Flat, fibrous, colored, yet a liveliness is emerging. I am considering them in animated terms. They have an intention specific to the pages. I may be able to surmise this, I’m not necessarily privy to the wider picture.

When I am painting, the familiarity of the materials allows a certain directness about what I’m intending. Quietly stepping away from that sense of focus delivers me to witness territory. This territory yields results that seem to have made themselves. It’s a way of reaching beyond the house of consciousness, taking a stroll in a nearby garden. Once this way of working is entered, the agency of materials, the intention that resides outside my own house of consciousness, the volition of that which is coming into being makes visible the collaborative nature of the creative realm. (Inspiration, the muses, ideas are eclipsed.) I consider that I’m holding the papers, cutting them, loading the paintbrush. The ineffable sense of what happens seems to have little to do with my volition, intention or agency. I ask the work: what do you wish to say? What will we announce to the world today?

Looking For The Differences, coptic bound book with poem by Tom Hennen, Looking For The Differences. One of the page spreads below.

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This body of work is produced on a polypropylene material, Yupo. It is mounted onto medium density fiberboard or thin plywood panels that have been sealed. A conservationist suggested that there is some kind of off-gassing happening because of the dry heat. It is not difficult to continue thinking of this as inert material responding to environmental change.

Resolving these bubbles has taken some research and exploration. I have come to see these changes in the works surface as indicative of more than simple environmental interactions. I am tested, my choices in how to respond to this curious incidence determine the resolution. Across the ocean, Matthew Burrows is a painter living and working in England. He has written a luminous piece about the act of painting; what is it, what does it mean, why do some of us return to it again and again. This essay examines choice, response and resolution in art making. You can find it here:

Matthew Burrows MBE

Longing and Joy

What a strange thing it is to enter a studio each day and submit to the longing that draws me back, despite the apparent pointlessness of it. I am not entirely sure why I return, nor who, in the end, it is for.Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work…

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5 months ago · 69 likes · 13 comments · Matthew Burrows MBE

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Bird of the Universe 2, mica, Venetian plaster, black spray paint on yupo mounted on a panel, 12” diameter.

Matthew’s thoughts carry within them a bridge. Making a painting is the process of breathing an idea into life. His essay describes the inner workings of this process. My connection here is that when work goes sideways (for example, it develops bubbles you had no intention of creating) something else emerges. The real possibility that inanimate materials are developing their own voice, their own presence in our physical world presents itself.

Our guardrails about what is alive and what is inert are firm. Rock-like. Rocks don’t think, they are not alive. Yet. Enter a conscious state that has been altered (through psycho-active chemicals, meditation, mushrooms, etc.) and these trusty guardrails melt away. The breathing of rocks is clearly taking place. When we work with a process that is invested in manifesting thoughts, we are encountering a conscious state that contains breathing rocks, that allows for a reality beyond everyday guardrails.

The world around us is so alive. The world within us is so alive. Many people are paying attention to this. Our understanding of conscious presence is changing as it becomes clear to us that humans are not the only things thinking, feeling, perceiving, conscious. When something unexpected happens in the world of artmaking, we can glimpse the gestalt of our consciousness, the space, the presence it creates in our lives. We are also able to see past that, to begin sensing beyond the tight guardrails we’ve been habituated to live with.

The world is bubbling up in surprising ways.

I’ve consulted with quite a few people regarding the surprise bubbles. After some tests, I’ve developed a method to relieve them, returning the surface of the painting to a near normal state. One needs sensitive eyes and some guidance to track where the bubbles were - I’m pleased with the results. When the work returns from the above mentioned exhibit, the bubbles will be repaired with this method.

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Reweaving the Rainbow

Introducing Reweaving the Rainbow

We are Maria Popova and Willow Defebaugh. We met at a loom on a farm, bonded over Maria’s bird divinations, and decided to apply the same process to an ethos we discovered that we share: We both love science — that is, the wonder-smitten human passion for truth, for understanding how nature works, for peeling back the curtain of mystery to glimpse tiny …

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5 months ago · Reweaving the Rainbow

Last week I did not write a post as I had nothing to say. The news has been what it is for too long, producing heavy feelings, discouraging thoughts and a general miasma of dismay. Finding something that takes as its ethos the wonder-smitten phenomena of our world seems a good focal point.

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Bird of the Universe 7, oil paint, mica, Venetian plaster, black spray paint with 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel, 24” diameter.

Yesterday I turned to the garden. Hands in dirt. A direct antidote to a discouraged heart. The robins are in spring mode, announcing rain, inspecting freshly turned beds. One so bold it took no fear in my presence not 3 feet from its rounds of inspection. The doveery of morning doves has dispersed, now they show up in pairs. I feed them intermittently, when it is a cold morning, yes; otherwise I hope the lack of a a table laid with their favorite foods will encourage them to forage.

Yesterday I planted two white lily bulbs. At the entrance to the garden, clumped with the hyacinths where their fragrance will greet anyone. This hopeful act was paired with potting 10 fledgling trees that arrived bare root from the Arbor Day Foundation. This collaboration is what makes sense when events on the larger stages are unfeasible, incomprehensible, illegitimate, unrestrained, unjustifiable.

The roil continues. As the dirt warms toward planting time, hands gone grimy, it is this vital connection that will sustain me; us.

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He observes how grant making programs for artists shift “significant resources while also consolidating institutional authority through opacity and canon-making.” If we stop to consider this other side of the coin, we can easily see how the authority of institutions is amplified each time they announce another round of funding.

He goes on to describe a new award process, one in which a redistribution of resources is not part of the power structure. “Positioned within an environment already structured around attention, branding, and circulation, the awards operate as an event first. A ceremony, a gathering, a narrative about value delivered in real time. What is being consolidated in that moment is less a redistribution of resources than a temporary alignment of attention and influence, a performance of power that remains largely intact within existing structures.”

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We are witnessing a time that is suffused with the performance of power. Just when we think it can’t get any more blatant, it does. It grows oppressively flagrant. Has it always been a fact that artwork, artists, are bound by power? From an artist’s viewpoint in creating work the answer is a resounding no. From a dealer’s perspective in creating monetary worth for the work the answer is a resounding yes. The pathway many artists take is to simply turn the back to the marketplace, finding other means to pay bills. What matters is small, localized circles of energy. Each of us gets to figure out what that might be.

In a recent zoom gathering, evidence of a localized community focused on making visible the work of artists was shared. What is it like seeing inside a transformative transition? Many of the most potent comments shared addressed a change in the way artists care for one another: sharing opportunities, recommending each other, buying each other’s work. Absent was that once common sense of competition. Where we are, and where we are going is toward an art ecosystem that is open, welcoming, compassionate and kind. I believe we’ll get there because it’s the us that is shaping this transition.

https://hyperallergic.com/awards-season-and-the-management-of-cultural-power/?ref=daily-newsletter

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“I cannot help but wonder if this neglect is because of her belief in the legacy of oil painting dating back to the Renaissance, as well as the fact that she has never been associated with Bay Area figurative painting or the Funk movement, despite living, teaching, and exhibiting there for many years. Artists who follow their own paths are generally not held in high regard unless it fits a curator’s agenda regarding politics, hot-button topics, or the “right” kind of abstraction — which are reasons why Joanne Greenbaum, a New York-based painter who is Carnwath’s temperamental opposite, is missing from those museum collections, too. Their fierce independence has not gained them the recognition it should have long ago.”

Reading between the phrases, between the lines, there’s a sense of limitation embedded in this quote. A limited amount of high regard, the limitations of who is admitted to museum collections. The choices and decisions of who is admitted to the “canon” and who is not is a complex dance. Knock on the door all you want, when the pie has only a limited number of slices, somebody doesn’t get pie.

There’s a problem with this idea of the limited pie, only so many slices of it to go around. It’s kind of a neat idea when it comes to the necessary limiting and narrowing needed for a market to succeed. There has to be limited pie to create want, scarcity to underscore rarity. Once that sense of something being unavailable settles, the scramble to acquire it drives action. The overriding exclusion of only so much pie becomes a silent something you swallow.

Only so much pie creates an atmosphere of competition, everyone crawling all over everyone else to grasp that last slice.

When It Rains, solar etching, edition of 12, 21 x 17.” This etching is available as part of the Pay What You Wish project on my website. Find it here.

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One of the things about pie is that it’s not so healthy – often containing way too much sugar, and too few nutrients; it’s fine for a now and then treat. Thinking of it in this way prompts a reconsideration of how to understand our work in the exclusion of the marketplace. It’s not about the work. It’s not about you. It’s about populating, crafting, and controlling a story (the history of art!)

I’m glad of the nod toward fierce independence in the quote above. Keeping the work visible in the world doesn’t necessitate shopping for daily pie. It does require the breath of a community, a circle, an audience that hold up the work, that sustain it and support it. We are abundance for each other.

https://hyperallergic.com/squeak-carnwath-paints-her-own-path/

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These thoughts about the art marketplace began when I initiated a Pay What You Wish feature on my website. Find it here. All of the work presented for pay what you wish is available, find the archive at the bottom of that page.

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Museums around the world are filled with anonymous works. After a certain period, artists began taking credit for their work, signatures appeared on the surfaces of paintings, pottery was signed underneath. As artwork entered the market, and the market embraced this wondrous product, producers needed cache. Before the rise of credentialism (MFA programs) there were fewer artists. The market could (almost!) serve the many of them. To make their products more enticing, the practice of cult-making developed. It was easier if the artist was dead.

In some instances, the “great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, especially as manifested by a body of admirers” * had merit. Visionaries taught us to see and think differently about the world and our place in it. They opened taboo arenas. They resisted cultural regulation. In many cases the inventions or innovations simply addressed the market, that need to make something “new” so it was marketable. The general public was never able to keep up, never educated sufficiently in the visual language toward independent reading. Amazing artists were discovered. Lauding their genius became a singular tool to sell the work. The what and the who were disconnected, not needed. To rise to this level, to call oneself an artist became an abiding ambition.

You might be wondering what this has to do with meaning. Or its crisis.

Spark, 20” diameter, oil paint, mica, Venetian plaster with 23k gold.

The art market has matured along with all the other markets in our late-capitalist, materialistic world. The cult of the artist has also matured. This doesn’t mean there is no meaning left to be made visible via the visual language. Nor does it mean there is no meaning left in the world. It does imply we might leave off the aura of cultism. Artists are not going to save our world, nor solve the meaning crisis. We also are certainly not going to disappear.

I seriously wondered what I was going to write about this week. If you’ve been along for the ride, you understand I made a commitment to write about art and the art market some 15 weeks ago. Every week. Think some thoughts, write them down. I caught a bug this week that laid me low – zero energy for anything except the biological necessities. While horizontal I listened to one of the episodes at Poetry Unbound. https://onbeing.org/programs/kevin-hart-prayer/ I connected it to a favorite poem by Czeslaw Milsoz, On Prayer.

“Prayer”
By Kevin Hart

O come, in any way you want,
In morning sunlight fooling in the leaves
Or in thick bouts of rain that soak my head

Because of what the darkness said

Or come, though far too slowly for my eye to see,
Like a dark hair that fades to gray

Come with the wind that wraps my house

Or winter light that slants upon a page

Because the beast is stirring in its cage

Or come in raw and ragged smells
Of gumleaves dangling down at noon
Or in the undertow of love
When she’s away

Because a night creeps through the day

Come as you used to, years ago,
When I first fell for you

In the deep calm of an autumn morning
Beginning with the cooing of a dove

Because of love, the lightest love

Or if that’s not your way these days
Because of me, because
Of something dead in me,
Come like a jagged knife into my gut

Because your touch will surely cut

Come any way you want
But come

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Each poet addresses this phenomenon, one pleading with it to return, the other likening it to a velvet bridge that we all walk no matter what. The what is that haunting question: what is this reaching? Whom to?

Some turn to prayer in desperation. Some in daily attentions. If we do participate with it, if we pray, it is often with the attention to that which is outside of our conscious selves. We invoke, request, plead. We wish to make our voice a two-way street.

Quiet prayer, loud prayer, silent prayer: poets have advised us about praying for millennia. With good reason. We cannot accept our solipsism; it is a patent lie. It seems to me this old way of opening whatever veils separate us (from each other, from the “other side”) has remained a vital presence because it is useful. I think it is like metaphor: it transfixes, grafts, fuses the unlikely, the disparate. Praying makes the now of our lives large, alive, connected. Even when it cuts us to our core.

For those of you patient souls who are still reading, here’s that bridge. Here’s the meaning. That poem makes me catch my breath. It obliterates all other thought strands and insists on some new ones. My claim here is one of an anti-cult. It’s a dis-belief of veneration. I have no doubt that you will walk away from reading Kevin Hart’s poem with your own understanding, interpretation, your own hooks where his language has caught you. You can’t venerate something that generates disparate effect. Thank god. In conversation, or by ourselves, we can make a meaning that is not for sale, that is not going to bring us material gratification, safety or well-being. Your experience of this poem, or that painting, that theater, dance, music experience, is yours alone.

But we can talk about it.

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Here is a reference that has a presence in what I wrote above.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-183320553

* Dictionary.com

This is my work, https://fitzgeraldart.com/

This is the project that prompted these ruminations: https://fitzgeraldart.com/pay-what-you-wish/

For the past several weeks I have been investigating the emerging popularity of altered states. Experiencing altered states in nothing new. What is new is that peer-reviewed scientific studies now exist that document these states and understand the brain-based and cultural contexts that hold them. A key question regarding the expanded percentage of people experiencing altered states is what they do after their experience.

“These experiences are phenomenologically real, structurally consistent across different access points, and fundamentally challenge our materialist assumptions about the nature of reality and consciousness.”*

What might an altered state tell us about the inbetween existing betwixt value and the monetary silo? One experience is in a shared realm, the other in a realm free of whatever it is we experience in time and space; the latter has little to do with our convoluted valuing and monetizing attitudes. There is a quality of the general world view that centers on materiality. Some might say that we live within the “claustrophobia of materialism”.* (Webster describes this as a doctrine that the only or most highly valued objectives lie in material well-being and in the furtherance of material progress.) It suggests that any consideration of the spiritual, the etheric universe is purely a fiction. But the materialistic world view may be at the extreme edge of its growth spiral and with any further momentum, perhaps it will swing back toward a balance with the “other”.

Pool, 42” diameter, oil paint, India ink, mica, 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel.

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In reports from paranormal experiencers there’s a repeated consensus of feeling our world, our normal conscious experience of it is as a stage set, and beneath this is a super-alive world. An infinite vastness, in Meredith Spearman’s words, …”the “realness” we’ve invested in the physical world is actually the illusion, and what we’ve dismissed as impossible or symbolic is closer to what’s actually true.” Not everyone is buying the rampant materialistic world view. Materialism holds little regard for the value of something except for its monetary standing. This chasm between value and money seems impassable. Where’s the bridge when you need it?

I’m equating value with the world that includes a rich spiritual reality, and money with the strictly materialistic view that discounts whatever is irrational, subjective, unproven. When I pull on this thread, it does not point to a widening, or a narrowing of the inbetween separating value and money. It puts in high relief the discordance. Fitting a square peg into a round hole has not reached resolution – it remains enigmatic. This is the paradigm for value and money; they share space in the most enigmatic of relationships. Most artists probably do not hold a deeply materialistic world view. Speaking for myself, I am aware of how deeply I hold the value of the visual language. When sending work out into the world, assigning a monetary value feels surreal, impossible, distasteful.

We live in a magic universe: when we recognize that the magical and the meaningful are woven into the fabric of reality itself the edge of dissonance between value and money softens. And while the softening helps us with the dissonance the enigma of these two doesn’t dissipate. Money is not the symbolic language through which reality speaks to us.

“So yes, we are invested in this physical world, yet it’s only an illusion. The shamans and mystics have told us the same thing, all throughout the ages.”

-Mike Clelland from an interview here:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-185077054

*Meredith Spearman

https://substack.com/home/post/p-187228402

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Pay what you wish

How does one cross this Rubicon? Artwork has a powerful is-ness to it. Like rocks, trees, rivers, the ocean, it is pure being-ness. Our conscious understanding of the monetary economy does not and never will square with this other quality of artwork. As I consider and reconsider this conundrum what emerges is the need to craft a larger reality for the being-ness of artwork.

What is encoded in the visual language and its history of material presence is a careful notation of a widening of consciousness. For centuries artists have been opening the portals between our understanding of consciousness and a deeper experience of it. Scientists are learning how to define our default parameters that structure our (common) experience of consciousness. They are uncovering surprising things.

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…”reality is weirder than our models permit, consciousness is more powerful than our frameworks acknowledge, and the boundary between imagination and manifestation is porous. Under the right conditions, reality responds to attention, intention, and symbol. Not cleanly. Not predictably. But meaningfully.

This is the door through which it enters. Paradox. Ambiguity. The space between categories where something else can manifest.”

The Shadows Of This Earth, 42” diameter, oil paint, mica, Venetian plaster with 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel.

In discussions about consciousness, we are learning to situate it beyond the boundaries of our bodies. Esoteric literature speaks of our etheric field – also extending beyond our physical self. We are beginning to see the fluidity and plasticity that comprise the world.

Your artistic umwelt encompasses whatever goals matter most to you. (An umwelt is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems.*) Our consciousness exists in a cultural umwelt that provides guardrails and flashing lights to suggest what to pay attention to, what to ignore. I’m noticing that we have entered a time when these guardrails and lights need to be ignored. What is becoming visible to the populace at large is that we are all part of a multi-lingual, multi-faceted consciousness that encompasses some mind-bending territory. For example, imagine a foamy field encompassing not just our world, our solar system, but the entirety of the Universe.

“At the Planck scale (the foundation of physical reality) spacetime itself becomes what physicists call quantum foam: a seething substrate where virtual particles pop in and out of existence, where the smooth geometry of everyday reality breaks down into probabilistic flux. At this level, the distinction between observer and observed, between information and matter, between here and there, simply dissolves.”

We are witnessing the dissolution of many things. Our world is churning through huge changes, and none of us will be free from being affected in one way or another. This thought from a recent essay by Matthew Burrows about painting as a form of resistance has the clarity of a ringing bell. It is what we embody that matters. This is true across the board, not just in the studio.

The above quotes can be found in two lengthy articles linked below.

*Wikipedia

https://substack.com/home/post/p-185648923

https://substack.com/home/post/p-185561227

Matthew Burrows MBE

Painting as Resistance

I don’t often get angry. But watching the way people are being oppressed, murdered, and manipulated in Gaza, Sudan, Iran, and across the United States, makes my stomach churn. It’s hard to stay calm in the presence of such open brutality, and harder still to accept how quickly it becomes normalised…

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7 months ago · 76 likes · 25 comments · Matthew Burrows MBE

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I’ve always had sensitive radar regarding discovery. My inner elf self wished for it. Fervently, when I was young. Yet I never bothered to engineer it. What would it mean to be discovered? Someone with influence or wealth would begin the shepherding process. I would only have to be me and continue with the work. The rest would take care of itself.

Clearly, this has never happened. I see it from a new vantage point now, this wish for the mysterious other to step in and direct the visibility of my work. The financials would flow smoothly, I wouldn’t need to consider if I could buy an extra book of gold leaf.

Taking on my own visibility and keeping the presence of my work at large has been a shuffle, like bumper cars muddling through the lack of lanes and traffic signals. The opportunities to present work sometimes appear on the horizon. I say yes, let’s do that. Or they might come through an application process. Most often, this effort to stay visible has been sustained by the incredible community of artists I am a part of. We save each other daily. As my wise friend, Deborah Barlow says, you simply need to be crystal clear what you wish to happen; what is your goal?

Welkin II, 30” diameter, oil and mica with 12k gold on yupo mounted on panel. Part of the What You Cannot Hold exhibit at the Gallery at 310 Riverside Drive, NYC. Click the image for more information.

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On January 29, 2026, the NYC artworld lost a wonderful leader. Ted Berger led the New York Foundation for the Arts for 25 years. He stood on the soapbox for countless issues. The one I most identified with was his push to persuade art department chairpersons to augment their curricula with business courses so artists would have a grounding, and basic understanding of how to move forward with their careers. I think he will turn in his grave the day this is common practice for all BFA and MFA candidates. Ted’s goal was always in service and support of the artists. He knew how important we are.

I didn’t feel discovered by Ted Berger. But I did come to realize that I was never going to have that fairy-tale discovery my elf self wished for. Now and then I get a whiff of that wish and recognize it for a fantasy that lacks the understanding of what community now means in the art world. When I was a young person growing up on a dairy farm, the farmers would pool their resources when it was time to thresh oats. I witnessed the transition from shocked oats that was threshed with a non-mobile machine to the coming of the combine, a mobile machine that drove up and down the rows of oats, cutting and removing the oat, spewing the stem behind in golden rows. Even with that transition, the farmer community still worked field to field – sharing a combine until one farm’s oats were in and then the next to be completed.

Discovery and all it entails share the toxic neighborhood of the 15 minutes of fame guaranteed each of us by Warhol. If it arrives, turn your car around. Head somewhere else.

Go to that place where you have the right to be undeciphered and explicated. The right to be untranslated. The right to resist consumption. It does not mean you will be mute. It guarantees nothing, and maybe that is as it should be.

Find Barlow’s erudite and expansive blog here:

https://www.slowmuse.com/

She’s presented over 1500 essays since she began posting them in 2012.

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The week was full. I attended two opening receptions for exhibitions including my work: one a solo presentation at the Gallery at 310 in NYC, the other a group effort in Boston. The gatherings were festive and filled with conversation. No one was clambering. No one was building the next connection for their work. What is this game that is supposedly rigged? What happens when one stops playing?

In between the two events, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the Martin Puryear exhibition. It’s a beautiful presentation of his work, not a sprawling collection that exhausts anyone who tries to take the whole in. Rather, the pieces unfold across several galleries, interspersed with prints that reflect a mind considering how form can speak to the past, the present, and the future. Puryear is a humble being, just getting the work done. He’s managed to find the right people to help him make the work visible at large. And then there is the firing of 33 workers at that institution. Keeping their books balanced on the backs of the workers. My private experience juxtaposed with institutional choices, a sobering conundrum that is present more frequently as I navigate this world.

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It’s helpful to notice those around us who are inventing other ways to put their work into the world. The pay-to-play entry fee scam is becoming thinner, more obvious to a majority day by day. The truth is we are each responsible for building our own visibility. A gallery is not going to do that for us. Most of us do not possess the connectivity that will electrify a plugged-in sophisticated PR machine, reaching into media culture, projecting our work onto the well-lit stage.

“There is, in 2026, a perfectly rational basis for cynicism about “making it” in the creative arts, and it has nothing to do with sour grapes or declining standards and everything to do with political economy. Never before have networking, patronage, nepotism, and plain old rank corruption played such an outsized role in determining who gets seen, published, optioned, streamed, featured, or taken seriously at all. As legacy media contracts and the attention economy atomizes into a million mutually indifferent siloes, the old myth that the cream rises has been replaced by a newer, uglier truth: access rises. Who you know, whose child you are, which fortune bankrolls you, which brand can subsidize your “voice,” which institution can afford to float you through years of precarity - these things now matter vastly more than whether the work itself is good. In literature, film, television, music, pick your poison, the system increasingly functions as a transfer mechanism from social capital or literal capital to cultural capital, laundered through the rhetoric of diversity, hustle, and authenticity. If you lack connections, a family name, independent wealth, or the sponsorship of a corporate gatekeeper, you’re not paranoid to feel locked out; you are accurately perceiving the structure of the game. That this awareness often shades into basic jealousy is neither surprising nor especially damning. It’s simply what happens when a society insists, with a straight face, that merit still governs outcomes long after it has redesigned every institution to ensure that it does not.”

You can read the whole of this post at the link below. While I do not support the entirety of what this person writes about, in this brief quote his words say what is felt. They summarize a more general feeling found within as well as outside of the culture industry and that has expanded over the past year – that feeling of being steamrolled by the many things one disagrees with. Words are ever powerful. They create reality that obliges with the thoughts shaping it.

My work is probably not destined to be the stick in the hurrying waters of a stream that accrues debris, that eventually shifts the current, that redirects the stream. Rather, I think it is like a feather floating on this seething current. My words, and more importantly the paintings I make, will also float past you. At some point we will all learn to worry less about the seething roil and notice those smaller things that return us to a humbled conception of our participation in the larger community.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-184775385?selection=6eed28b9-b6c3-404f-828e-eb52b825b183

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Something that might seem safe from dirty power is emerging as anything but. Culture is awash in multiple reckonings, from the white-male-only privileging to the money laundering happening not just in the top tiers of the art market. It’s enough to know how deep it runs by simply noticing the term culture industry. Awww, we finally have a seat at the big-people table along with all the other industries gutting this planet.

The nature of the fame industry is that there is only so much fame to go around – a very limited pie. This construct encourages competition. Competing begets betrayal; the only thing that matters is the goal: becoming famous. It doesn’t matter what realm you are in. Politics. Movies. Making music. Making art. Writing. Teaching. Journalism. Sports. The list is exhausting: exploitation, contradiction, injustice, lack of equity, corruption, dysfunction. We are all snared in the dirty power of the fame machine, and the monetary rewards it promises. Is power ever other than dirty?

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Image: When Night Lifts Into the Sky, 21 x 17,” solar etching

At this point, if I had not written thus far, and was merely reading these words, I would be headed for the door. It seems that dirty power is inescapable.

Yet, there are so many good people on this planet: people who are not interested in the dirty power web. People leading lives who care for their communities, who are involved in their neighborhoods, raising families with children who are loved. People who are pursuing their work and remaining as far from the clutches of dirty power as they possibly can. Why, you might wonder, take the time to focus on the awful things we cannot control?

I’m encouraged by many things. Communities choosing to be true to those things its denizens need: health, wellbeing, equity, and sustainable practices for the environment. Artists are re-inventing an art world that works in their best interests. A new aesthetic is emerging: it rejects the Cartesian duality that cleaves us from the natural world.

Here’s the thing about the new growth side-stepping the dirty power web: it’s localized. The engines of dirty power don’t train their eyes on localized phenomenon.

I wonder at how long it takes to learn something. Some days it seems that I’ve spent my life understanding these complex dynamics that shape my work, and my career. And it doesn’t matter how long it has taken. I’ve come to know at a deep level that if I don’t shape a container for my work, no one else will either. I am not going to be “discovered”. I do not want to be famous. I understand what this means.

Working locally, in a small collective of artists, to bring our work to an audience, to create our own web of experience: this is what is important. The axiom, “act local, think global” has a new meaning. None of us should hope to act globally. Like the mycelial networks that link the roots of trees into an underground community, our understanding of community is having its own renaissance. I see evidence of this across a spectrum of books: poetry that affirms joy; anthropology that refutes a simplistic determination toward capitalism; individual efforts making visible corrupt motives; artwork that has dug for its own authenticity.

I’m calling to each of you to look around and find these things, and to put your energy and focus there. Dirty power is not going to bless the way forward: we are going to bless our own way forward. And it’s not going to be based on, or in, dirty power. It’s going to be a localized effort.

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Here’s a terrific resource for perspective:

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Find pay what you wish here.

It turns out that growth at all costs is not good. In the 1970’s a team at MIT constructed a web of interwoven factors that illuminated the damage to our planet unlimited economic growth was causing. This kind of growth was not solving the problems of poverty, malnourishment, disease. It was simply creating a class of oligarchs at the expense of everyone else including our very sacred Earth. We have reached the point of no return. Growth is killing all of us. And yet industry continues to plunder not only our natural resources but has moved the extraction economy into our personal realms, monetizing our personal data as well as our experiences.

In the natural world, growth is equally unbridled. Plants do it. Big time! Pruning a fig tree will re-direct its energy, but it does not seem to send a message to the tree to stop growing. The mind-numbing seed-setting and seeding that happens at the end of the growing season preps the stage for the next year of wild expansion. Yet this kind of prosperity is balanced by the cycles of our planet. This kind of growth is fertilized with the gift economy. Robin Wall Kemmerer has written about the reciprocity built into the natural kingdoms. Its powerful message can be scaled up or practiced at an individual, local level. To think in terms of reciprocity, gratitude and community so that all flourishing is mutual – this is the kind of growth I can embrace.

Image: When There Is Light, solar etching, 21 x 17.”

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The creative process mirrors the natural world in its embrace of growth. As an artist, I am always restless, pushing the visual vocabulary I’ve developed over time into new territory, asking new questions, imagining new things. Different from the extractive nature of capitalistic growth, creative growth follows a structure that yields a ripening of oneself, one’s understanding of the world. When an artist understands their work as part of the very large conversation that’s been occurring across eons, there’s a sense of duty toward reciprocity.

We might label this duty, responsibility. Right now, it seems we all carry a responsibility for one another. Person to person in our neighborhoods, on the streets we traverse.

“Taking responsibility in a paradigm shift is therefore not about carrying more, but about carrying differently. It means refusing to continue compensating for systems that refuse to take responsibility themselves, and instead directing one’s energy toward the places where new relationships, new mandates, and new collective forms can begin to grow.

Here, responsibility changes direction. From maintenance to transformation. From guilt to choice. From solitary burden to something that can be shared.”

Read more of what Anna Branten has to say about responsibility here:

The Starting Point

Exploring how we live, work and relate in times of transition - where the personal meets the systemic and the visible meets the felt. Writing from the in-between, where the things I’m not supposed to say often become the most honest.

By Anna Branten

Find Robin Wall-Kemmerer here: https://substack.com/@plantbabyplant/reads

Find pay what you wish here and here.

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One of the mechanisms that is ever present in the pricing of artwork is the push for higher prices. Once work sells at a specific price point for a period, the artist is urged by her/his gallerist to raise the prices. This mounting pressure of ever-increasing pricing is designed to suggest to the marketplace that this work is growing in value. Pricing work in higher ranges is designed to attract the more affluent buyers.

What is gained when we price our work to make it ever less accessible? Why is there an eye-brow raising cachet to the number of zeroes at the end of the price point? I am fond of the story of the very expensive banana duct taped to a wall at an art fair where someone passed by, took the banana and ate it. “The physical banana itself is not the artwork; the real value is in the certificate of authenticity and the detailed instructions for its display. The banana is a perishable element that is meant to be replaced as needed. The piece is intended as a commentary on global trade, the absurdity of the art market, and what society values.” *

When There is Fire, solar etching, 21 x 17,” edition of 12. New work up on pay what you wish.

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The kind of expansion gained when one reaches the required number of zeroes motivates a sort of visibility deeply attached to notoriety and fame. Both outcomes are toxic, to the work, and to the personhood of the artist. We live in a world that worships this kind of meritocracy, fame at all costs. It is hollow. The focus on fame removes a relationship to our own communities. It establishes a power of an outside gatekeeper that replaces dialogue and discussion in the village. It shuns any sense of a village function and produces an abjective presence in the work.

The artwork mentioned above is called, Comedian, but Maurizio Cattelan. Sly, winking at us across that divide. Catalan is participating in this kind of abject expansionism, producing grand visibility for himself. Colonizing the visual language with a kind of absolute certainty that there is nothing to see here.

How capacious is our imagination?

As New York’s new mayor says, “Imagination and affordability are not separate forces, they are intertwined.”

Thanks

By W. S. Merwin

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

taking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

thank you we are saying and waving

dark though it is

*Google’s summary.

Some further reading about our current economic conditions.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-163414870

https://sceneonradio.org/s7-e1-market-failure/

New work has posted to the pay what you wish project. Find it here or scroll up and click on the image.

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Some decades ago, a concept was added to the list of basic strategies for survival in social animals. To the long-recognized strategies of “fight or flight” was added, as equally indispensable, “tend and befriend.” (I again leave it for readers to ponder the relevance of this for global political practices.) The word “tend” shares its root with “tenderness” (also with “attention,” “intention,” the small boats called “tenders,” and though a stretch here, “legal tender” – money). All come from the Latin verb tendere: “to extend outwards or upwards, to stretch toward or hold out, to offer; to direct toward, to aim toward.” In some foundational sense, whatever we look toward or hold our hands out to enters first the realm of our awareness, then the reach of our actions, and finally, in the largest sense, the embrace of our care.

I was struck with this post by Hirshfeld because it brought tenderness into economics, through that phrase, legal tender. It is an odd phrase, equating legality with a subtle emotive phenomenon. Legality as in courts, law; enforcement. Tenderness may be strictly a local phenomenon, available on choice between a few people at a time. Yet it is also a powerful feeling. When we demonstrate tenderness, when we feel tenderness, we are opening our inner and outer selves to a vulnerability, a delicate balance between the exposure of true feeling and the suppleness of empathic relationship. As Hirshfeld carefully uncovers the meanings of this word we see that to hold out, to offer, to extend outwards or upwards is very much a part of the pay what you wish pricing effort. It is very much an offering, an extending toward another.

Tenderness can be an elusive thing these days. One of my favorite paintings is the Annunciation by Botticelli at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It embodies tenderness.

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The story this painting depicts is the moment an angel arrives to tell a young woman she is about to bear a child. Without the religious details of this narrative, it is apparent that each regards the other with great tenderness. The angel is from the spirit realm, the woman from the physical realm. Botticelli emphasizes this by separating them with an architectural doorway. The angel is in one realm, the woman another. The angel arrives with a white lily, symbol of purity. Each bow to the other.

What is wondrous about the visual language is that the sense of tenderness between them is palpable. Can I put this into verbal descriptive language? Possibly, but it would bore everyone to tears. This sense of tenderness is the point of the painting, it is the primary message. Not fear, not duty, not deliberation. There is nothing calculated here.

To push our poor language a bit further, each is a tender of the other. Was the message from the spirit world delivered before this depicted moment? Did the weight of the message come after? In our time laden world, this may seem important. But it isn’t. As each tends to the other, they are considerate, gentle, gracious. They are each taking care of the other.

When we think of our legal tender in this way, we are taking care of one another when we engage in financial transactions. My pay what you wish project is an effort to make this taking care of explicit. Your choice within the price range assists you in taking care of your wishes, wants, needs, desires, while my laisse fair pricing of the work makes a tenderness of exchange capacious, stretching the work outward.

As Hirshfeld says, “The tenderness all good art carries – … – asks us to enter, to embrace, to not turn against or away from our own lives and the lives of others.”

May the whole new year be filled with legal tenderness.

Late Prayer

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.

It goes out to everything equally,

circling rabbit and hawk.

Look: in the iron bucket,

a single nail, a single ruby—

all the heavens and hells.

They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

-Jane Hirshfield, The Asking: New & Selected Poems (NY: Knopf 2023)

Find Hirshfeld’s post here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-165910428

Find a her post that preceded the one quoted here:

Find pay what you wish here: https://fitzgeraldart.com/pay-what-you-wish/

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The issue of valuing and pricing remains a presence in an artist’s world whether we welcome it or not. The energies of exchange shift in a subtle and beautiful way when another realizes they’ve been invited into the power dynamic that pricing is. Sharing power in the economic exchange of artwork is at the heart of the pay what you wish pricing approach.

Power sharing can be many things, a negotiation, a confirmation, a determination of trust. At a basic level, it says that I see you. The negotiation part is internal, a discussion that happens within when the presence of power is an inclusive presence. Certainly it can become external! Navigating the power of price choice can be surprising, challenging, a delight.

Townsend Lake

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It can also be disorienting. The little, internal voice we all carry around with us might ask, what kind of scheme is this? Is it a setup? Is it a racket – and what sort of maneuvering is going on here? The economics of our world rarely power share. Cost, pricing, is a black and white no grey inbetween habit in our world. There is a starkness to it that aims toward efficient exchange. Socks for dollars.

I’m not interested in denying the constructs of the economy we inhabit. Yet it is also apparent that economics are habitual. Google says, “A habit is a routine behavior or thought pattern that becomes automatic through repetition, occurring subconsciously with little to no conscious thought, like brushing teeth or checking your phone. These learned actions, which can be good (exercising) or bad (nail-biting), are formed by consistent practice and are triggered by cues, eventually becoming ingrained in our daily lives and reducing the need for self-analysis.” Participating in power sharing through pay what you wish is an excuse to slow down in the money lane. An excuse to re-navigate the power of pricing.

they come
to where the leaves used to live
during their lives but have gone now
and they too take the next step
beyond the reach of meaning

In this fragment of W.S.Merwin’s poem, To a Leaf Falling in Winter, he is addressing everyone (leaves included) on the cusp of transformation. The reach of meaning is finite, and beyond that reach there is the infinity of the unknown, the unpracticed, the non-habitual. It may be grandiose to suggest this but perhaps pay what you wish is that experience that might carry us into that beyond, however so modestly we navigate it.

Find Merwin here: https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2008%252F11%252F02.html

To a Leaf Falling in Winter

by W. S. Merwin

At sundown when a day’s words
have gathered at the feet of the trees
lining up in silence
to enter the long corridors
of the roots into which they
pass one by one thinking
that they remember the place
as they feel themselves climbing
away from their only sound
while they are being forgotten
by their bright circumstances
they rise through all of the rings
listening again
afterward as they
listened once and they come
to where the leaves used to live
during their lives but have gone now
and they too take the next step
beyond the reach of meaning

“To a Leaf Falling in Winter” by W.S. Merwin from Present Company. © Copper Canyon Press, 2007

Spring Light

Find pay what you wish here: https://fitzgeraldart.com/pay-what-you-wish/

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You cannot fold a Flood—

And put it in a Drawer—

Because the Winds would find it out—

And tell your Cedar Floor—

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s thought, “The very floor upon which we stand will hear news of what it is that’s being hidden” grounds us in contemporary time, in the now, of how we might consider these lines, written over 150 years ago. The media reports on many things that are being hidden. Demands for transparency and visibility echo. Within our own worlds, and specifically within the art world, pricing models often hide crucial understandings. We focus on news of record prices at auctions, the bottom line of sales at art fairs. I’m not interested in engaging in a rant “against”. There is a natural power to suggesting that our “floor” will hear about these hidden things. The potential of the poetic language is to make a bridge between the material, literal meanings of a word and its metaphorical presence. It’s illuminating to consider the floor we stand on as our internal value system; as the shared cultural valuing we engage with; as our less-than-conscious knowing that keeps us steadied in the roil of the world. These interpretations of a ‘floor’ hold us up.

West Woods 2, watercolor on Karst.

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Having spent a lifetime pricing work “as though” it was embedded in the gallery economy, there are a lot of threads to untangle. For the most part, my work has never been fully embedded in the gallery economy. That ‘floor’ has never been supportive for my work. When I am pricing artwork as an independent, un-represented artist, I consider prices in a different way. While this is nuanced, it is an important dynamic.

In the growing economy that puts planet and people ahead of profit, artwork is not labeled as a luxury. It is essential. My work matured with thoughts and connections to the broader cultural conversation, my hand at work. My studio work is decidedly un-collaborative. It is individually made, yet it is part of the conversation of our culture. In view of these values, what is the fair price for the work? If I bring you into that choice, the dynamic shifts considerably.

Power dynamics change when you are given a voice in the issue of valuing an artwork. Some will see this simply as an opportunity to get a “bargain”, getting over on the system being justification enough. Others will give it serious thought; what might the price I choose say about me, my relation to the artwork, my relation going forward with the artist? What will the cedar floor find out?

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Portal, watercolor on Karst.

Find these watercolors available pay what you wish here: https://fitzgeraldart.com/pay-what-you-wish/

Find Pádraig’s post on Substack here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-180839973

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The shape of our interior lives, and how this container fits that of our exterior lives, is often invisible to us. We know our thoughts, to a certain extent. We connect dots between intention, community, conversation. What form might our interior life be, what shape does this container take: an expanding star with arms booming outward; a gently sloshing blob with soft edges; a morphing tetrahedron with bulging, pulsing sections. Is it something that morphs on a daily or hourly basis? Thinking about this interior in terms of the visual language is interesting in that it helps us see into this interior. The relationship of our interior world to the exterior one is grounded by what we value and making it literally visible for ourselves by imagining the shape of it also illuminates the container that holds our valuing system. Perhaps these two are shapes within shapes.

Our value system/s act like a bridge connecting these two worlds, interior and exterior. It’s not the only connective thing. Valuing is not a solipsistic endeavor, rather the opposite. It is profoundly community-based. The spiritual tradition we were raised with, the family we came into the world within, the political and economic system we participate in all shape our values. Like that question about the shape of our interior life, the shape of values is also morphing. Perhaps these changes follow the arc of astrological influences.

Above: Laniakea Rose, available as pay what you wish.

The other evening, I attended a choral concert presented by a group in a local church. The program related to the holiday season, with interesting interpretations of some usual songs. Within minutes I was held in thrall: the interior of the church filled with the powerful resonance of song. I was shivered. Having paid the admission dollars, experiencing this music was far outside of monetary understanding and completely within the significance of meaning. Without the dollars to enter, I would not have experienced the beauty of this music. It seems we cannot simply cross the threshold to do away with the interference, the insistence of the monetary economy. And do we wish to do that?

You cannot put a Fire out—

A Thing that can ignite

Can go, itself, without a Fan—

Upon the slowest Night—

You cannot fold a Flood—

And put it in a Drawer—

Because the Winds would find it out—

And tell your Cedar Floor—

-Emily Dickinson, Sheet 5, 1863.

This poem crossed my desk in a weekly newsletter from a poet I admire, Pádraig Ó Tuama. He makes note of the complexities of this poem, “I find myself seeing this poem as one of remembrance, one of warning, one of reckoning with the things that have gone before and how their power must be attended to.” He goes on to ruminate that this poem may not be about the past but exists in the present. “The very floor upon which we stand will hear news of what it is that’s being hidden.” The powerful energies, fire and flood, have their way in the world. Like value and pricing, we cannot hide from their influence and presence. It is a tension we must navigate on a regular basis.

Find Pádraig’s post on Substack here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-180839973

Find pay what you wish here: https://fitzgeraldart.com/pay-what-you-wish/

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When we engage with our world outside of monetary value, we notice and understand benefits, meaning, content, purpose, quality. The import of a thing turns on its relationship with not only the outer world, but our inner world as well.

Valuing a work of art outside its monetary designation yields clarity. Artwork benefits our imaginative capacities. Each time we return to experiencing an artwork, what our imagination brings to that encounter is different from the time before. Neural networks have shifted and will shift again. The content of the work may not have changed, but the interactive essence of its content shifts with each experience of it. Its content shifts with the light of day, or a change in where it physically resides. The work ages; slowly, subtly, or noticeably day by day depending on the materials used in its construction. Content has never been static.

The artists I engage with - having coffee and conversation, exchanging poetry, discussing and reviewing exhibitions – contain vast interior worlds. Their work reflects what is of importance in these inner worlds. Some examples: the relationship of matter and spirit, the ineffable impossibility of expressing something and having another receive that idea, the nature of energy, the nature of things that are invisible, the essence of the divine, the relationship between the printed word and the forms it is expressed within. We spend time thinking about these things and our work explores, explicates and enumerates the thoughts we have about this content. Artwork embodies our ideas. We find deep value in that mode of communication. Metaphor and materiality create a magical world of meaning.

The value of these kinds of inner, invisible thought worlds has direct input to the work we produce. Absence sense, quality, commitment to purpose, and the life goes out of material processes in art making. This understanding of value is difficult to equate in the monetary realm. There’s a sponginess present when you attempt it. If I am selling bits of my mind vis-à-vis what I’ve embodied into a material thing, the equating of that is fraught at best. On the other side, someone interested in purchasing my work Is caught between a rock and a hard place in the value/monetary equivalency. If affordability is not at issue, there is still the haunting sense of ownership. Can these thought manifestations be owned? Shining grace = ownership as conversation; owning a work of art allows a regular entry into the conversation of meaning the physical object creates each time you engage with it. If affordability is at issue, the juggernaut of balance between needs, necessities and budget provides an additional squeezing. A saving grace is the touchstone that the artwork is: a thing unto itself, speaking its own voice and participating in the world at large on its own.

The Pearl From The Wind, 17” diameter, oil paint, India ink, mica with 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel.

She found a new home recently - may an expanding, rich conversation unfold in its new home.

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