All Over the Map

Once upon the long ago, I felt apologetic, embarrassed even, about traveling across various forms of expression. About ranging—widely, wildly—across writing genres and styles, and about acting out a restlessness to move in different directions, to try on new selves. 

No longer do I feel that way about my long career as a writer and academic, a career that gave way to my practice of painting. With the gift of hindsight have I come to understand that ranging around as a writer of literary scholarship, then poetry, fiction, memoir, nonfiction, and drama testifies to an abiding and healthy curiosity, one that gave me the confidence to commit myself to painting when I retired from academia. 

Painting was not, however, an entirely new direction for me; rather, it was a return to a yearning I had as a young woman in a small-town high school, who fantasized about attending art school but lacked the training and resources to do so back then.  

The boon of retirement is the gift of time. 

My years of exploring different genres as a writer have made me comfortable, even excited, about trying different genres and styles of oil painting. About journeying all over the map. I suppose that is why, when categorizing my paintings for display on this webpage, I chose to group them as: places, things, people. 

Yet despite the disparate styles and subject matter, my practice of painting is informed, as was my practice of writing, by a singular desire to know: a desire elegantly expressed by T. S. Eliot in his ruminative long poem, Four Quartets:  

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I paint to know the past, to know places, people and things, and to know myself: over and over again.

And always, for the first time.