3 birch panels (acrylic; 8'x12')

#beloved

Themes:  Community . Support . Identity . Helping Hands . Relationships

This piece, #beloved, is different from my other pieces in that public engagement is with the completed piece, and not part of the process as it was with the others.
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My inspiration came from these words:

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
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- Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

​Beloved.  Circling around that word, beloved, again and again as I considered how to paint it was like entering a vast meadow.  I wandered there for some time to consider its expansive sky and pungent earth, its magnitude, its intimacy . . .   
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There is nothing banal or threadbare here in the poetic space created by Carver’s poetry.  Within these lines is our shared humanity with all its provocative contradictions of light and darkness, rising and falling, beauty and difficulty, cherishing and loss.  My work as an artist is to step into the exquisite mess of it all and find expression.

​Hands and feet, those extensions of heart and soul, more readily express what words spoken in our particular dialects and paradigms cannot.  In this piece, I invite the viewer to step into the circle of hands and be embraced.  The physical act of a viewer placing themself into the centre of the image, framed, suggests inclusion.  Being beloved is always multi-directional.  In this age of pandemic reality, with the familiar theme of physical distancing and resulting disconnection, even here, there is invitation to embrace and to be embraced.