My delight as I’m working is in interacting with what I start with on the canvas, the colors, shapes, lines, energies, images that show up, and the unexpected surprises that emerge as the process unfolds. The name “process painter” comes to mind.
“Dancing With the Stars”. I didn’t know what to expect, I just knew I needed to be out there. Awaking about Midnight I looked out the cabin’s window and saw lights flashing. I stepped out barefoot into the warm June night, off the porch and into the grass. Lightening bugs flashed pure white all around and above me the stars too! My arms lifted upward toward the living lights of our crackling ancestor stars, and outward to the sweet insects twinkling around me—dancing with the stars! With the Holy. Finally I stood still there, still, silent, held inbeauty, in joy, in presence.
“Winter Milkweed” When I came across this milkweed in the North of Wisconsin one icy January morning it captured me with its graceful structure. Winter winds had emptied her pods of their hundreds of seeds. This “mother plant” stood empty now, her life complete. The end. But joy rushed in as I saw how her children scattered far and wide, settled in places where they could be planted in the earth by spring rains and give rise to a fields of offspring. The fresh hope that begins to rise in winter, will take root in spring. It is the way of life!
“Child of the Universe”. We are children of the Universe: not just the stars and meteors and galaxies, but everything on this Earth! Plants, flowers, evergreens, dear, birds, water, stars, galaxies, fungi, animals huge and tiny.. . we are all children of the Universe! Each and every element of our bodies was fashioned in the Stars, billions of years ago! It sounds like a dream, but it’s the unexpected truth, all fact, which we have only recently begun to understand!. How wonderful! We’re all related! We’re all family!
Mary Southard is a working artist and gardener whose fascination is the wonder and ongoing creativity of the Cosmos / Earth. Her paintings and sculpture works explore and give expression to the journey of the soul within this intimately interconnected evolutionary existence, its beauty and longing, passion and mystery, its seeming serendipity and intelligence. Mary’s delight is to be with others as we explore the mysteries of the Sacred Universe revealed today, and the new self-understanding and participative role they offer us. She lives and has her studio in La Grange Park, Illinois. Visit her website @ http://www.marysouthardart.org or on Facebook.