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Sunflowers for Ukraine

Sunflowers of Ukraine

Months ago which feels more like years following months of dreaded anticipation, Russia invaded Ukraine. February 24, 2022.  Images of  bombings, families huddled in basement refuges, people running in the streets, burned out and shattered homes have  been constant reminders of the human toll that has been taken.  I recall rather vividly how shortly after it all stated, we learned the meaning behind the Ukrainian flag….fields of sunflowers against a clear blue sky,  Such contrast to what we saw through the past nine months.  My watercolor friends and I peppered our Facebook pages with images of sunflowers.  I resolved to plant sunflowers in my garden and to paint more of them…, mostly so my heart would remember  the strong images of the women of

The Mothers’ March

Ukraine guiding their children to lands far away, courageous and strong, met by women on the safe side of the border offering food and lodging and strollers for the children.  Horrendous evil counterbalanced by hearts torn open with kindness and caring.  I painted images I felt more than saw just to keep my heart tuned into what was happening.

 

My sunflowers grew.  I drew them and I painted them.  One particular painting turned into a prayer.  It started out well but somewhere along the line I determined it needed to take a different direction.  I decided to cut it up and stitch it and turn it into a quilt-like image.  That failed too.  So I continued to cut, to tear, to stitch pieces back together and to sit and stare at the remnants to determine how I could make something from the shattered pieces.  The metaphor became clear.  Ukraine as it had been is gone, broken and shattered.  Lives are lost, Families are displaced.  Futures are uncertain.  My prayer becomes one of hope that they might find  the shards of their lives and put them back together.

Page in the prayer book   Page in the prayer book    Page in the prayer book

And so my Ukrainian Prayer Book came to be, just a small 4″ square with only a few pages , the product of hours of thought, doing, undoing and redoing.

A Band of Mothers

In art, as in life, sometimes the journey leads us in unexpected directions.
Such was the case with the twentieth kimono in my series.(you can see the entire series and how it came to be here ) It has been a long and exciting journey with some very unexpected twists and turns and as so often happens the journey has been as important as the destination. Over a year ago (evidenced by scibblings in my journal) I started entertaining a final kimono in my series, commemmorating all the mothers, in my life. I started with the most obvious: my mother, my sister, my aunts, cousins, nieces, teachers, role models, friends …….those who mothered, not only my body, but my spririt, my mind, my soul, my heart, my art. The list kept getting longer and broader until it encompassed Mother Earth herself! Symbols of so many different aspects of these mothers percolated through my thoughts, including needles, garden books , letters, photos, fabrics, even clothespins! The “stuff” increased and the imagery became more and more complicated. The world events of the past two years created a complicated backdrop that included mothers visiting their children through hospital windows during covid; the mothers and grandmothers of Ukraine and the beautiful Polish women who welcomed them into their homes; bluebirds and nuthatches in their springtime nests around our home, the novel I was reading about the women of the Great Plains, young women giving birth, family stories…..all spoke of motherhood to me. Everywhere I turned I seemed to be met by mothers and their strength and beauty.
On an unusually warm early spring day, I sat near a star magnolia in my yard, and drew.

That’s usually where my head clears best and my heart can see through the clutter. This magnolia in all its pure white beauty spoke to me of life and motherhood. The branches were twisted and complicated. Some branches bore new buds not yet open right alongside spent brown and withering flowers. Some branches even had greening leaves. “Simplify, simplify, simplify

, “the magnolia said. I drew and then started to paint. Then I painted some more. I awakened at night sure I knew what direction to take to move this painting that had no real direction into a kimono, only discovering after another day down another path, that it too was not the right one. I “auditioned” ways to develop the core painting: weaving, piecing, stenciling, quilting, stitching by hand and by machine. I ended up rejecting them all after hours of unsuccesful attempts. The process itself became an integral expression of motherhood. I felt like the birth of this kimono was unlike any I had done before. I was in a very long hard labor, knowing as mothers do, that even the pain of creating is part of the beauty of motherhood.

For All the Mothers
The final image here was done in memory of the women (and some men) in my life that mothered me each in their own unique way. It is really very simple but has layers that probably will only be recognized by me, or some very perseptive soulmate. It has been an amazing journey as this piece came to life. Every stroke of my brush awakened another preciouos memory. I am filled with gratitude.
Will it be the last of my kimono series? At this point I am not sure. At one point I thought #10 would be the last. But they kept on coming. I hope to stay open to the possibilities of things to come………

Hurray For Our Side!

sunrise
The Fierce Call of Morning

“Hurray for our side!”……That’s what my Dad would say when someone in the family accomplished something worth crowing about.  All of us knew just what he meant: he was proud and wanted us to know that.  When I got the news that “The Fierce Call of Morning”  (12×18 woven watercolor on yupo) was accepted into the 2021 Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration exhibit of the Tennessee Watercolor Society, I was sure I heard Dad celebrating with me with that expression.  Then it got even better this week when I was invited to attend a virtual zoom awards presentation where I was pleased to receive an Honorable Mention award.  Yep, there was Dad, cheering once again.   On-line only, the exhibit represents some of the finest watercolor in the South.  Hurray for my side!  You can enjoy the exhibit in its entirety here.

I have been experimenting with woven watercolors since January 1, 2018sunrisewhen I decided to try “something different” for the new year and did a small piece I called  It’s a New Day which now lives in Springfield,  Missouri.  I have lost track of how many I have done since ,but they are fun, challenging, and surprising.  The technique involves painting two paintings about the same size and similar or complementary subject matter, then cutting the two in opposite directions and  weaving them together. The result is hard to envision in advance and some end up in the recycle bin!  This one didn’t! 

Number 19

blue kimono
Ambiguity

For those of you who have been walking with me for awhile, you are well aware of my ongoing kimono series. For those who have recently joined me, you can read about this series that is so very important to me right here. Today I am sharing the nineteenth kimono of what started as a ten-kimono goal. This particular kimono started a year ago. We had just gone into covid lockdown. Every next step seemed unclear, ambiguous, and, yes, more than a bit frightening. It was to be a year of ambiguity. That year is behind us as I write this, but there is still a lack of clarity. The fog is just starting to lift. We’ve all experienced the lifting fog some time, whether actual or figurative. We see it over “our” mountain frequently. Clarity starts to come at the bottom and gradually work it’s way up the mountain, revealing slowly the fields, the trees, the mountain top, the sky. That’s where I feel we are now. We are starting to feel we can plan a trip, or an event, or even a gathering with friends. But the clouds of uncertainty and the harsh warnings from the CDC give us pause and those year-old fears creep in again. That is what this kimono is trying to say. I have been working on it off and on over this covid year. It was larger for awhile. It was textured. It was even a totally different color prompting me to buy a new tube of Venetian Red! But this is how it turned out. If you look closely you will see row after row of small holes made with a dressmaker’s tool for transferring a pattern, along with row after row of machine stitching in “Yale blue” and metallic silver. As I write this, I am still not sure if the image is complete or even if it is the right image or if I need to start all over. I have tempered hope that the fog will lift and we will feel the freedom of a bright sunny day…..eventually.

Land of the Wild Passion Flower

Land of the Wild Passion Flower

Sometimes multiple interests come together in a single painting.  Such was the case with this piece which combines my interest in nature, art, and native American history.  Phew!  All in one little roughly 9×9 watercolor.

butterfly on a passion flower
Depending on Beauty

The image is of a gulf fritillary that has a unique relationship with this flower, commonly referred to as the Passion Flower.  Both are beautiful creations in themselves, but what is so interesting is that this little butterfly MUST lay its eggs on this particular plant because that is all their fussy  little caterpillars will eat!  This is just like the relationship that monarchs have to milkweed.  My practical side says, how inefficient, how unwise to be so dependent on a single food source.  Could it be that these butterflies need beauty in their lives too??

And there is more to this story. The Cherokee who used to inhabit the very land I live on here in southeast TN called the fruit of the Passion Flower “u-wa-ga” and the area around the river where it grew was called “u-wa-go-hi,” which means “where the passion fruits grow.”  To English speaking folks this sounded like “o-co-ee” and so the river became the Ocoee River and the land nearby was called Ocoee, which is where I live.  So I live in the Land of the Passion Flower!  There is so much in this story that I love, so I had to paint it and I finally did. I have painted the flower several times but this is the grist time I have included the fritillary as well.  Purchase information can be found in the Birds, Butterflies, and Beasts gallery or in the Blossoms and Blooms gallery.

Solar Flare

abstract sunrise or sunsetOn a weekend following a number of days doing relatively non-creative tasks, my insides demanded some play time.  A very energizing exercise for me is to do one of my woven paintings.  To do this, I generally paint two paintings, often on yupo, that have some similar elements in color and/or line.  Yupo is a synthetic material that has a very hard non-absorbent surface that does not act at all like traditional watercolor paper.  It is hard to control but results in very vibrant lively color that I love to work with.  After painting and letting them dry well, I slice the two paintings in opposite directions  and then weave them back together.  The fun part is that I never quite know what the finished piece will look like.  Ok, it’s not always fun but it sure can be interesting…..This is one of those surprises.  It could remind the viewer of a spectacular sunrise or sunset,  thus the title “Solar Flare.”  The image itself is 10×14 and it is matted and framed to 16×19.  You can see more woven watercolors here.

Morning Moments. the story behind the exhibit

Moonrise“Morning Moments: the Story behind the exhibit”

Well over a year ago I started preparing for another hometown exhibit, painting images of a variety of subjects in a number of my favorite styles, some detailed and planned; others, loose and spontaneous.

Then 2020 happened.  The show went on hold.  Life itself went on hold.  I continued painting but something different started happening.  I found myself drawn to small pockets of time on small pieces of paper, usually in the morning before the noise of the news cycle got in the way and with a fresh abandon, perhaps freed from exhibition expectations.  I started thinking of these painting times as “morning moments,” not necessarily because of the time of day but because I was fully awake, alert, and aware of gentle stirrings that seemed to bypass my brain.  The small simple paintings became heart-filled responses to an anxious sleepless night, a line of poetry, the song of a bird, or the whisper of the wind.  What was common to all was an absence of thinking and planning.

The results of those morning moments are collectively some of the purest and most honest paintings I have ever done — simple, spontaneous, and highly personal.  When the opportunity came about recently to revisit an exhibition time at Glass Growers Gallery, I knew that I wanted to share them.  My hope, my prayer, is that they will communicate between my heart and your heart and that they will stir something in you and bring you some of the peace they brought me as I painted them.

I am grateful to Debby Vahanian and Glass Growers Gallery for giving me this opportunity to share these paintings with you, to have this “heart to heart” conversation.  In my nearly 40 years of painting and exhibiting this may be the most unique exhibit I have ever had. Thank you for joining with me on this journey.

This exhibit is now over.

 

Marie Spaeder Haas

August 1 – September 8, 2020

Glass Growers Gallery, 10 E. 5th St., Erie PA

gallery hours:  11-3 Tuesday through Saturday; Monday by appointment (814-453-3758)

 

The darkness of the morning news

painting of a dark landscape
Embracing the Darkness

“Embracing the Darkness”

I’ve been working small during these days turned to months of the pandemic.  I work fast too without analyzing or questioning the strokes that find their way to the paper.  Some times it takes days or longer for me to understand what my hand has revealed.  That was the case with this painting.  It came after a particularly dark and depressing morning news.  We have a lot of those lately.  I felt rather down with it all, with thoughts like “why art?”  “why bother?” creeping into my thinking.  This morning I looked at it again and the words of Wendell Berry came to mind….”In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, I walk the rocky hillside sowing clover.”  A friend reminded me that clover nourishes the soil.  Ah, yes, I said.  And art nourishes the soul.