SOLO: That Far Away Blue 2025
"For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between here and there.
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air; it scatters in water. Deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in that blue.”
—Rebecca Solnit from A Field Guide for Getting Lost
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I have been an artist-educator working with our adolescents in the public schools for 30 years. Throughout my career, I have sought this place where one-part closes and another part opens and have now reached a “gate” which opens toward that far away place within the dreamy blue of the horizon. This writing by Rebecca Solnit felt like it was taken right from my heart even though it was written in 2006, 19 years before this body of work was created. Solnit’s passage presented itself while I was on retreat, researching the blue that I am compelled to include in my paintings. I was so excited to find such a profound connection to her words that I called my soul-sister-fellow-artist-educator to share my excitement. We discussed how “that far away blue” relates to our current “place” in life and how our perspectives have changed and grown.
Despite every intention of working more abstractly in this body of work, as I painted… the horizon persisted. My work evolves naturally during my creative process. I skim the edges of intuitive and intentional marks in my painting process; directed by the paint itself, an innate sense of design and my own endless curiosity. In the past few years, I have been painting distant blueish horizons with scattered diagonals and marks racing toward that skyline. Those diagonals and lines are opposed by horizontals and verticals with ranges as thin as a quill pen and as broad as my 10” brush. I started incorporating stripes in my work in 2023 after a friend gave me some green and white striped glassine bags. They found their way into every piece. They complicated the natural forms and space of the landscape. For years, stripes have been used in artworks as a fundamental design element, a conceptual tool and even as a social commentary. In Daniel Buren’s work, alternating black and white stripes disrupt the physical reality of the environment forcing the viewer to re-examine the space as they perceive it. His use of stripes as a French Minimalist resonates with me and the function stripes play in my current work. My use of stripes, pattern and dissonant marks intend to distort space, opposing loose brushstrokes and blooms in wet media with structure and stability.
The places I paint are places I have been, and yet they are nowhere in particular. Liminal spaces that offer a sense of potential, where people can reflect and engage in new ways. Sometimes these places educe from the viewer a connection to their own memory- a special place and time. In my current “place,” the promise and hope of that far away blue now feels closer. It arises in the space between here and there and sometimes appears in the right now. Knowing that far away blue is unreachable is comforting and liberating at the same time.
Because when your destination shifts and eludes, there is infinite permission to continue seeking.