Joy

Watercolor on paper
15” x 11”, 2019

This painting is part of a series included in the exhibition, ‘The Thin Place,’ which comes from the old Celtic concept for moments of heightened permeability when veils that separate the living and dead or the human and divine are at their thinnest. It can also refer to specific places that possess a palpable ‘heaviness’ or haunted quality, particularly sacred sites or where something of great significance unfolded. I expand on these traditional meanings to include any transitional space, moment of uncertainty, or provisional period where everyday objects and experiences divide, collapse, intermingle, or coexist in unexpected ways. Moments of death and birth are perhaps the most intense and straightforward examples. Yet there are all kinds of ongoing subtle slips and thin divides in life once you start looking for them: the young becoming old. Material shifting into immaterial. The ordinary becoming extraordinary.

From solo exhibition The Thin Place At the Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD