Two creatives, looking at the very same sky?

I’ve been reading poetry lately as part of my creative practice. Sometimes I read a poem after completing a painting and it feels like somehow the poet and I were drinking from the same stream of questions or delights when we created our respective works.

I’ve also increasingly been embracing intuitive ways of working and letting my landscapes evolve from fragments of memory and imagination rather than reference material or actual places I’ve been to. So I had no idea where this artwork was taking me.

But as I worked, I found that I was primarily occupied with enjoying the sky. So much so that I wanted it to feel like the sky transcended ideas of being “above” or separate from the land. Instead, the sky and land are integrated. Which they really are. (Like so many things we mentally or verbally separate).

And I spent many days gently layering the colours of the sky, enjoying playing with layers and transparency and emergent colour.

The result is a creative process - and end product - full of sensory delight, and expressing a peacefulness, cheerfulness, and playfulness. I love the ambiguity and openness to interpretation in the shapes I’ve created too, and the spaciousness for the viewer to make their own connections to their own experiences and memories of landscape and place.

And then I read the poem, “The Sky Was” and it felt like e.e.cummings and I must have looked at the very same sky and been interested in the same themes of sensory delight, play, and ambiguity.

So I’ve titled this artwork after the poem… “The Sky Was.” Click on the images below for more details on this painting.