would that we could wake up to what we were
when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all----- nothing
- From “Singularity” by Marie Howe
Are landscape painters drawn to nature as a subject because of a spiritual affinity, or do they discover that affinity through the act of painting nature? Such chicken and the egg queries may indeed miss the point, but we come across that relationship between nature and spirituality all the time. By quoting this Marie Howe poem, written in tribute to Stephen Hawking, Sharon Weis lets us know in no uncertain terms that her practice may be nothing less than a search for understanding about the very beginning of life. Hawking was a scientist, but Howe is a poet and Weis a painter, and both of these artists find beauty in the level of discovery in the work of the world-famous physicist.
Weis describes her act of creation, the action of painting in language that reinforce that connection between rationality and the spiritual:
“Moved by lavish paint and painters, I love the lush, liquid stokes attainable with oil paint. I use birch plywood as it is the ideal surface to accept the viscosity of paint I work to acquire. For color and compositional rhythms, I look to the natural world for inspiration.”
“In my latest series, the sea is lush, I play with composition and perspective shifts using panoramic views, emotive color correlations, and natural rhythms set up by sea and sky to create aesthetic divisions of space. However, it is the physical texture of the paint itself, the charge of paint I push into the clouds or the clean, thick, fluid stroke added to the sea that excite me most when creating these works.”
