Unfolding

 

Burly Tree 2021 S. Weinberg 30" x 30"

I have come to love the process of unfolding. That is a big statement from someone who likes to know where she’s going complete with an estimated time of arrival. I didn’t get to this place easily, but I am beginning to trust that the process will work if I let it. Now that doesn’t mean I get to sit back and watch it unfold. There is some work involved on my part, but I have found that if I do the work and trust the process, I am likely to arrive at an interesting destination, usually one that I lacked the imagination to foresee. It is a lesson embedded in any creative pursuit and quite different from my corporate career where I drove to conclusions. It still feels rather magical to me when it works. It is that sense of magic that intrigues me and I often retrace my steps to figure out how the magic happens. It isn't difficult to trace my journey. I need only read past blogs, but I thought I'd save you the trouble and summarize here.

Broken Bits of Beauty 2021 S. Weinberg

I’ve written this year about my work within the Artist’s Lab exploring Brokenness and Wholeness. The lab discussions give me a starting point, but I don’t leave it at that. When I have no idea where to begin, I just begin with something that relates. In this case I began by constructing a rather whimsical collection of broken bits and then painting them. I had no idea where that would take me, but it served as a meditation of sorts on the theme. 

As I was walking a lot more during Covid, I found myself much more tuned into the natural world around me. When I looked at my photos on my phone they were an amusingly odd mix of nature through the seasons, selfies with my newly silver hair and photos of my toes on the bathroom scale as I studied the pattern of weight loss from all those walks.  It occurs to me that all of these subjects are about process and my documentation of it. As the latter two subjects didn’t seem to lend themselves to artwork, I turned to my nature photos for inspiration.

The Survivor 2021 S. Weinberg 30" x 30"

My part of the work in this process is to operate on multiple channels. I read about related topics, I observed brokenness within our politics, I absorbed what others said about it through poetry and I painted my visual observations. One of my visual observations from my walks was a tree laden with burls, covered with round orbs, layered closely together. It reminded me of a strong man flexing his muscles as they bulged out on all sides. I began to read about burls only to learn that they resulted from brokenness of a sort. Infection or injury creates them and they are from the tissue of buds that don’t fully unfurl. I began to paint the burly tree and named it The Survivor. It looked so ungainly and yet it grew despite its disfigurement.

Inside the Burl 2021 S. Weinberg

Then I looked at an image of what burls look like inside the tree. They reminded me of a maze as they circled and spiraled, hitting dead ends and finding new starts. And of course I painted them. As I painted, it felt much like a meditation. A few weeks later I took a writing class  where the author who taught it had us create a form that looked much like a burl, beginning with a spiral formed of adjacent circles. It was a meditation to get us ready to write and it felt very familiar.

It occurred to me that in last year's Artist Lab I had also painted a tree, nicknamed Methuselah. This 4700 year old tree is one of the oldest trees in the world. I called the painting Tree-time, based on the meaning of dendrochronology which is the science by which we determine the age of a tree and the climate that has surrounded it over time. In that case I was looking at it as a messenger of our climate trends and the warming that we see today. After I painted the tree, I wanted to capture what lay inside that was so critical to the story. To that end, I put the tree rings behind the image.  It occurred to me that I seem to have this inside-outside theme going. For another lab I had done a triptych called Stepping Inside the Chrysalis which opened up to what is inside a chrysalis as a caterpillar undergoes its transformation. In both of these cases, nature offered an apt metaphor to what I was trying to say. 

At this point I had painted the burly tree and I had painted the burls inside of the tree in two separate paintings. As I thought of my prior inside out work, I decided to combine the two and started a fourth painting to do just that as I work those metaphoric possibilities. A burl presents a model of what many of us experience as we have false starts, dead ends, challenges and successes often in a very unpredictable order. In fact, it is all part of the process of life. Brokenness and wholeness are not discrete or static states. Rather they are a connected and winding path, a cycle that perhaps affords us greater awareness of its cyclical nature as we weather its troughs and appreciate those moments when we sense the wind at our back, finding a point of momentary balance.