As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I have a show up at the Bozeman Public Library through the month of September, called “A Picture and a Thousand Words. I partnered with my neighbor and plein air painting buddy Kim Epskamp to create the show, which features our artworks and our writing - my poetry and Kim’s nonfiction prose.
Standing beside my painting of Point Dume. Oil on canvas, 36” x 48”, 2024, $2500,
From August into September, I also had a show of my prints at the best coffeeshop in Bozeman, Wild Joe’s Coffee Spot on Main Street. Next month, I’m hanging some pieces at another popular Main Street hangout. Then I’m going back to the studio, and into the great outdoors, to find inspiration for the next body of work, and to recapture a sense of playfulness. I want to find out what interests me right now. I sense that it will involve people. I plan to try new things, both subject matter and materials. I also plan to put my poetry out into the literary space and see where it takes hold. Here is my poem Malibu, from the show.
Malibu
Malleable blue
hue mer
(an ocean joke)
wavelets and libations
delineated by terra firma,
landslid from mountain wrinkle
to welling tidepools.
The irony of laying claim to
your restless molecules of silica and sea!
Some lawyer said
“the mean high tide line”
equals something like “mine.”
The Chumash would spin in their graves
at the idea of owning you.
Oh you overdetermined slice of land,
sashaying your azure wavelengths,
making my memories vibrate
with your golden light too actual.
I have to write around you,
in curling surf
that touches and recedes,
touches and recedes,
because you’re too fraught
for any postcard.
-Elizabeth Anthony
At Wild Joe’s, in front of Phaeton’s Fall, Monotype, 11” x 15” (framed 20” x 28), 2023, $275.
That’s the yin and yang of life as an artist. You make work, then you show it. And you have to promote it. That’s the telling part. Ideally you sell it. But you have to maintain confidence in your work even if it doesn’t sell. I like to remind myself that Van Gogh sold one painting – one! – during his lifetime. In between the making and the showing, you also spend quite a few hours on non-creative tasks – stretching and priming canvases, finding frames and mats, putting the pieces into those frames, attaching D-rings and and wires . . . phew.
Much creating ahead. But for the next couple of weeks, I’m off to Lisbon, Porto and Paris. More later on the art scenes in those splendid places.