Between the highs of the mountaintop experiences like holidays, weddings, and vacations, we can forget to find the meaningfulness in the everyday. The paintings of Aubrey Levinthal celebrate the beauty to be found in the commonplace.
Throughout the day, I find myself being struck by the play of light coming through the window, the framed scene seen through an open window pane. Our albums are filled with captures of the important moments, but how often do we document talking over a leisurely Sunday breakfast or the loveliness of the evidence of lives well lived.
Very early tomorrow morning, I’ll be at the San Francisco airport. I’ll board a flight that will take me home. I’m going back to Florida to see my mom, for what I really hope isn’t, but could very well be, the last time. She’s losing her battle with cancer and all treatments have been halted. We don’t know how long she has– could be as little as two months or as much as a year. Every time I go back to Florida, it feels less and less like home to me. And once she isn’t there, I suspect that feeling might just be gone for good.
Since marrying Mr. F and leaving Florida, my heart has been torn between here and there. But home has shifted now. It isn’t my hometown, it isn’t even where my family is. It is wherever I’m making a life with my husband. And these days, that is wherever we happen to be. In each place we find ourselves, I put a lot of energy into making it feel less like a temporary landing spot and more like a home. It’s something I learned from my mom, this nesting thing.
When I think about her back in Florida, I picture her at home, surrounded by her favorite things– the teapots she collects, my grandmother’s paintings. Her home, the house she’s lived in for over twenty years with my stepfather, felt like my home, not just because I lived there for eight years but because she was there. Once she is gone, it will just be a house again, filled with her things.
The goodbye is coming, but it won’t be forever. I take comfort in knowing that she’ll be free of pain and in my belief that we’ll see each other again. But in the mean time, I’ll go home to her and then I’ll bring her back home with me in my heart.
Edited to add– I won’t be posting to the blog while I’m in Florida. Freelance work has kept me super busy the last two weeks and my spare time has been spent with Mr. F. I’ll be posting daily quotes on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram, as well as sharing a quick art find that resonates for me that day. Will be back blogging in a few weeks! Catch up on miles of artsy finds in the archives!
The paintings featured today are by Philadelphia artist Anne Canfield. To see more of her work, please visit her website.
For most of my life I’ve lived surrounded by friends and family, so being without a home never seemed like a very real possibility to me. As Mr. F and I travel, we do occasionally find ourselves “between homes” temporarily, but that usually just involves a few nights in a local hotel while trying to find a rental. While living this past year in Eureka, we’ve encountered a homeless population to rival larger cities. I always wonder about them, how they came to where they are– was it a series of bad luck? Was it by choice?
We find ourselves walking by them, not making eye contact, trying not to notice them so they won’t notice us and make us uncomfortable. Perhaps through no fault of their own, these are the cast-offs, society’s discards that we’ve thrown away and never given a second thought. Because if we really think about them, we might see ourselves in their eyes.
These watercolor paintings from New York artist Alvaro Naddeo focus our attention on the consumption and consequent dumping of what was once needed, shiny and new. To see more of Alvaro Naddeo‘s work, please visit his website.
Do you believe in fate? I haven’t decided yet whether I do or not. If it is true that events in our lives are predestined, then it must be true that “fate is a cruel mistress”. This series of photographs by Ann Woo of a facedown playing card drove home to me the idea that we never really know the next card in the deck.
I find, though, that it isn’t the hand we’ve been dealt, but how we play it that is the faithful test of who we are. We’ve watched our best friends deal with crushing blows that might have destroyed others, yet they continue on full of grace and courage and love. Cancer patients unwilling to be a victim fight back with everything they have. A son turns tragedy into a life’s work in order to prevent others from the same pain. We may be dealt a full house or a just a pair, but if we know best how to play the cards in our hand, we can still come out a winner.
To see more of Ann Woo‘s work, please visit her website.
I stil vividly remember spending days with my mom, sister-in-law, and grandfather going through my grandmother’s things after she was gone. How very adamantly he wanted her things to go on in this life, even when she did not. I’m not as attached to material things as I once was, yet when a person has lived with and used and touched objects I do believe they become sort of intertwined with that person’s spirit for a time.
We each have different ways of interacting with the things around us– from the way we set the table to the way we hang ( or don’t hang ) up our towels. My grandmother’s clothes, while jammed into every available closet space, where meticulously well cared for and carried her scent long after she no longer wore them.
After a loved one is gone, we want to cling to every precious memory and momento. Even the most insignificant little object can carry with it great meaning. But as time goes by, the memories don’t fade, yet our need to grasp those objects close often does. It’s as if our loved ones spirit hangs about as a comfort to us for a while and, when we are ready, it gently lets us go.
These still life paintings by Erin Raedeke brought to life for me this concept of a memorial and spiritual attachment to things and the unique way we interact with not just the things we use each day, but how we use material things to remember the people we love.
Life is rarely neat and orderly. Like a bride in a Taco Bell drive thru, we find ourselves is weird positions and unexpected places. These paintings by artist Andrea Brown offer an elegant look at the surprising strangeness of life.
Sometimes, we’re moving along, everything calm and monotonous even, but then something remarkable happens to surprise us. Maybe a butterfly comes through an open window and greets you or you spot a hint of green vine slowly creeping its way up a lonely wall. These are the moments that we sometimes overlook, but the ones that layer our lives with joy, that let us break for smiles in what is often too much drudgery. I’ll be on the lookout for surprises this weekend, will you?
Here on the Northern California coast, the days usually start off cool and grey, and then, if we’re lucky, the sun and blue skies make an appearance for the afternoon. Once the light begins to beam through the windows and cast long shadows, the world seems to take on a completely different character. In her work, artist Stephanie Pierce explores the phenomenon on light and its effect on our perceptions.
Through the windows, the sunlight comes pouring through, seen in Pierce’s paintings as fluttering fragments of color, whipping in and distorting the scene light so many butterflies emerging simultaneously from their dark cocoons. Shadows shift as the light moves and we understand that within light is the power to create movement– that nothing is truly static, all things changing as our perceptions alter.
When I was a little girl in Florida, I always remember my mom collecting shells every time we went to the beach. She wasn’t( still isn’t ) a swimmer, but she loved going to the beach and finding treasures. Maybe it’s where my foraging instincts come from? Maine photographer Jennifer Steen Booher creates abstract portraits of a day’s experience and what was found.
Whether the beauty of the craggy texture of a shell, or the shocking color of a piece of discarded plastic, each piece is a symbol of that particular instance, isolated against a bright white backdrop, even the ugliest trash becomes something special. After she has collected her treasures, Booher takes them back to her studio where they are carefully, meticulously arranged. The collections may seem random and haphazard, yet the artist’s eye finds common ground.
To see more of Jennifer Steen Booher’s work, please visit her website. Prints of Clematis Seedhead and other work by Jennifer Steen Booher can be purchased in The Trove, my gallery on Great.ly!
This post contains affiliate links. As a Great.ly Tastemaker and curator of The Trove, I receive a small commission on each piece sold from The Trove boutique gallery.
Humboldt County, our temporary home of the moment, is apparently known for its oysters ( among other things, ahem.. ). Their fame and abundance is pretty much completely lost on me. I’ve just never been much of a fan, will only eat them fried ( hello, southern girl ) or baked with champagne and brie ‘cuz I’m fancy like that and Mr. F makes them this way and they are not only palatable but to die for delicious! If there were any other way to make me love them, it would be through the work of this month’s Featured Artist Carlos Lopez, who finds amazing beauty in their jagged shells.
I’ve featured the work of this young New Orleans painter before and he is constantly “painting, painting” as his daily Facebook status attests, cranking out new, inventive ways of seeing his signature subject. Most recently, he’s taken to isolating his oyster shells on bright, bold backgrounds, giving them a contemporary pop quality that is especially striking. You’ll be seeing more from Carlos all through this month, so stay tuned!
To see more work from Carlos Lopez, please visit his website and the website of his representing gallery, Gallery Orange in New Orleans. Be sure to head over to the Artsy Forager Facebook page where Carlos is our cover artist and I’ve put together an album of my Lopez faves!
We live in a world of labels. Where the things we consume are linked to who we are– our personality, our political views, our wealth. Yet we make assumptions based on the consumption habits of other people all the time, whether consciously or unconsciously done. We gather around us these symbols of status and wealth, often more important to our perception of ourselves than anyone else. Michigan artist Jaye Schlesinger captures in paint the tokens of consumption that are often prized as much as the products themselves.
In the past, I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone, hoarding bags from my favorite luxury stores, even carrying my lunch to work in one occasionally. There is nothing wrong with nice things, of course, and if we can afford luxuries, why not treat ourselves? But the danger comes when we begin to judge others on the basis of what they can’t afford. For me, traveling with Mr. F has been incredibly freeing for my own magpie tendencies. We can only carry so much with us and, as we move from place to place, we find that more often than not, the people we meet are much more interested in who we are than in the car we drive or the clothes we wear. It is teaching me a lesson in perception that I’m not sure I would have learned otherwise.
Wow, heavy stuff for a Friday, eh? Jaye Schlesinger has more beautiful paintings of ordinary things ( my fave! ) on her website. Be sure to check it out!
