Seed Painting, Catalpa
22X28”, Acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 2020.
One in a series of eight paintings titled "Seed Paintings." Last spring, with the social isolation and with my daughter starting to crawl then walk, I was always in nature, and I could see in detail the transformation of the plans. I followed closely and with fascination the cycles of germinating, seeding, sprouting, growing, flowering, and producing new seeds. The way that I understand this experience is that we, in general, think that we know things, but there is so much more to actually know when we experience with detail and attention the subtleties of life. I learned that experiencing material life in its living transformation transports us through spiritual life. I painted the Seed Paintings to discover how life starts to become visible into materiality. I found that the paintings were ready once they returned to nature at the beginning of the winter, where I meditated with their images and photographed them. Catalpa is a tree that we can commonly find in the streets of Ithaca, NY.