Every painting starts with nature.
I take the kids out to play snakes in the grass on the lawn, to practice riding their bicycles—or four-wheel low rider for James, or to hunt for fallen leaves, mushrooms, or tadpoles depending on the season.
I take myself out for walks to catch up on sunshine, the sound of wind, water, and other living creatures, and most of all myself.
Out in nature—with the kids or on my own—is where I can zoom out. Where I connect with things in the world that are bigger than myself.
The natural world is filled with urgency—birth, death, hunger, transformation.
Yet it’s beautiful at the same time. The many lives of plants and animals being lived around me put whatever is happening in my own life into perspective. Life is short, and things change quick. So focus on what matters.
Every painting starts with a color I find wandering through my corner of the Dordogne.
A color from out in nature that speaks to whatever is happening inside me.
I take that color back to the studio—or sometimes the studio finds its way outside.
Every painting starts with a simple gesture on raw cotton canvas.
More specifically, it starts with my arm wildly gesticulating in the space in front of my canvas until I get a sense of the right movement and proportions to actually put a mark on the canvas. Then comes either a wonky old house paintbrush with watered-down acrylic paint or a fat, flat sponge brush dipped in rubbing alcohol.
I make a shape. And then the trickiest part begins.
Each painting comes to life with layers and layers of ink, acrylic paint, alcohol and water.
If I’m outside, occasionally bugs, grass, and rain get involved. I never know exactly where I’m going. I have the images in my mind that I started the painting with. And I have the story that’s connected to them.
This painting started with dandelions, some of this year’s first warm sunshine, and tiny green bugs scrambling across the yellow flowers.
I was thinking about how some things in life are obvious and some are so subtle they go unnoticed.
Often, between those two things, there’s a whole world.
Sunshine on your face is like a solid hug or the first bite of a hot meal. It centers you right in that moment in a way you didn’t know you needed until it’s there. Once it is, the feeling of ease takes over your whole body, and the only thing to do is go, “Mmmm.” That’s an obvious thing.
The tiny bug rollicking around next to me on a dandelion head is not an obvious thing at all.
I almost didn’t see it, except I pulled out my phone to snap some pictures of the dandelions. Yet there it was, perhaps, I’d say probably, feeling the exact same thing as me. “Mmmm, sunshine.” Maybe even more so because as much as spring sun feels like new life to me, it really is the beginning of life for bugs everywhere. Only when the weather warms up can they even appear to enjoy the world at all.
But life for a bug is harder than it is for me.
If my life feels short, then theirs is utterly transient. And if my life feels challenging, then at least there’s nothing trying to eat me. If my place in the world sometimes feels unclear or uncertain, at least it doesn’t disappear into a puff of fluff all at once.
That’s the world you can find in between what’s obvious and what’s not obvious at all.
And that’s what goes into the layers of my paintings.
That’s what the lights and darks of movement and color point to—all the range of experience and meaning we can find in our lives. Some things are drastic. Some things are gentle. Sometimes we see things in broad strokes and sometimes it’s all in the details. Life is vast, and the way we feel about our days covers a vast range too.
Different mediums help bring out different colors and textures.
Alcohol helps a color spread smoothly into the canvas like sinking into the sheets after a day where everything went as planned.
Water sits on the surface leaving a jagged edge—doesn’t life have so many jagged edges?
Drips and splatters can be solid or translucent depending on whether they’re made by ink, acrylic paint, or powdered pigment. They can pool shadows or look like reflecting light. They speak to the darkest and the brightest places we can find inside ourselves.
When alcohol and water meet, they make a texture like pebbles or ripples at the river’s edge. The kind of trembling you feel when facing uncertainty or anticipation.
After that comes the make-or-break-it point.
Because life is not just a landscape you walk through. It’s you. Walking through it.
And so every painting gets a line.
Sometimes two—aren’t we fortunate not to walk the earth alone?
The line is a trajectory across the landscape. The line is the path we choose every day in our own life. The line we use to connect the dots between everything we experience and the meaning we make of it day by day. A line that goes on and on and on until one day—it doesn’t.
Each of our lives is a brief and bright path traced across a changing landscape.
When I add the line to a painting, it’s a one-shot deal. If the pastel breaks, I just have to pick up a piece and keep following the line to its conclusion.
In theory, adding the line could ruin a painting. It could go completely wrong and screw up the whole thing. But I haven’t lost one that way yet.
The end result is never something I could have planned or foreseen when I started out. But somehow, each painting finds it own way. Once the pieces come together, it’s up to us to look at the whole and decide what it means.
Rather like life.
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Jourdie Ross
May 04, 2023
Thank you Erin! It is always precious to hear how the work speaks to you.