Winter’s Cloak

A Message Waiting at the Edge of Your Dream | Oil and mixed media on wood | 12” x 12” | © Laurie Doctor

Winter is a time for night and dreams to sustain us. There is always a message waiting at the edge of your dream. Something more is always possible. This series of paintings was inspired by winter, the necessity of the “bigger picture” in times of darkness, and the poetry of William Wordsworth — “Something evermore about to be”. Here is my artist statement:

This series of paintings began with walks in the dark of winter, collecting seed pods. The discoveries
I made about trees and plants and pods gave me cheer when the woods had little color or light.
I didn’t know that so many seed pods were in the shape of flowers.

The creative act begins with not knowing, with being willing to be in the dark, with planting one seed.
It is always possible, even hopeful, to begin again — to feed the unuttered seeds born and nurtured underground,
in the womb, in darkness. The darkness we all spring from leads me inward and opens my imagination. I begin
with my own small seed, with the universality of the unknowable mystery. This is the thread that ties us together.
No one is excluded and no words are accurate.

I empty myself of the noise of the world, become a receiver for what is waiting to come. The world responds
when I am whole-hearted and devoted to the uncertainty of my work and my life. Whatever is lost
has the possibility of being returned to us in a new shape: a recognition of a deeper pattern, seeds hidden in darkness.

You already know how to see in the dark | oil on wood | 12” x 12” | Inquiries contact Frankie York | New Editions Gallery

Doesn’t Everything Become Something Else? (left) | Winter Seeds Promise (right) | 36” x 60” Oil and charcoal on canvas | Inquiries contact Frankie York | New Editions Gallery
(These paintings inspired from yucca seed pods).

Winter is also a time to remember how creativity flourishes and even longs for darkness and solitude. When have you last seen a dark sky dripping with stars? I have just returned from a place, off-the-grid, that has no installed electricity or cars. The splendor and surprise of solitude and shooting stars!

Do you remember Mary Oliver’s essay “Of Power and Time”? I find this writing a good thing to return to, to give us the bigger picture of our turning world.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart - a pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again…..

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time. — Mary Oliver, Of Power and Time

What is your relationship with solitude, power and time? I’d love to hear from you.