The Thrust of Spring | Studio Notes

Studio Notes offer glimpses into my studio practice and creative process.

I’m lucky to live in a place where winter is never completely dormant, so we’ve been on the brink of spring for many weeks already. Lately, though, there’s been an undeniable shift rippling through the landscape and through every area of my life. I’m ready to welcome the emergence of what gestated in the fertile void of winter, as it begins to break ground.

My nervous system is adjusting to the influx of light; the dark days are over. The bear stumbles out of the cave, slow and blinking, eyes adjusting to the overwhelming brightness of a world that insists on being seen. Nature is wanting, horny, and hungry. There’s a certain youthful cockiness to the landscape, a loud and irrepressible vitality pushing outward. The thrust of spring. Which I delightfully receive.

The return of the light brings with it small freedoms. Mostly, it’s the longer evenings. After work, I go on long, meandering walks, and tune in to the frequency of place. I receive small gifts: image fragments, all sorts of messages, sparks of inspiration, even tangible, precious things like the tiny songbird skull I recently found in pristine shape beneath a hedge. I collect these bits and pieces and carry them back with me to the studio, where they shapeshift into something else.

In the studio, it seems like I’ve tapped the solar undercurrent of the relentless steed and painted this tiny painting. The mighty stallion forges ever onward, pulling the chariot of the Sun—the undying one—across the sky. In myth, Helios is the personification of the physical sun, the light that never fails. Apollo, god of light, music, and prophecy, represents the Sun’s radiant aspect. He is the beauty that shines outward, the birdsong that sweetens the silence. Very springlike, in my opinion.

I’ll leave it at that for now. I’m trying to keep Studio Notes more contained so that I have more time to paint and to write other, more time-consuming pieces, such as new installments of the A Magical Theory of Art series. Here’s my latest one:

A Magical Theory of Art

On Animist Creativity | A Magical Theory of Art

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Apr 6

A Magical Theory of Art explores the parallels between art and magic, examining how occult practices may be used to unleash one’s daimon and unlock the artistic imagination. Here, I turn to human creativity’s animist roots and explore whether artists have been midwives to spirits all along—possessed by otherworldly things that bestow the fire of inspira…

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Also includes the above tiny painting. You can send a private message to inquire.

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