This new LIVING OCEANS small panel series is part of my ongoing commitment to painting and video works for and about the beauty and sanctity of the oceans of our amazing planet. Each of these exquisite small panels was born in me on a Spring day in 2018 when a humpback whale appeared to me in the middle of the Puget Sound. No one else saw it, though it was perhaps the most ‘real’ thing I’d ever seen. But I did ‘see’ her, and even if it was only a vision, it has become the foremost of my artistic Visions.
I then knew nothing about the Humpback and her Oceans, so I got busy. I searched for and found full sound videos to help inspire my painting process (as I have done with all my other TimeSCAPES series). But unlike with my earlier subjects, I had yet to meet and experience the Humpback in the actuality of her vast Ocean.
And so my journey to meet her first began in early 2019 (before COVID) when I went to Maui to meet the Humpback on a big safe boat. Then that Fall I finally got up the courage (I was just scared to go out on this Sea that I now love, with all its depths and vastness) to go Tonga, leave the shorelines far behind on a very small boat and actually get in the water, take video and swim with these majestic and enormous Humpback creatures with their young, right there in their protected waters. Since then I have spent countless hours sketching and painting, immersed in sound, video and stills of my beloved Humpbacks, their own music, and music by others that’s been inspired by the Ocean and the creatures there who share the planet with us.
LIVING OCEANS TONGA • CETACEAN DREAMS then evolved into its own series as I began painting on a new initiative just a few months ago. Many of you know that it is the movement I see in my videos and in the sounds I hear as I paint that evoke my own full-body movement and dance-like motion as I paint. This motion is a meditative process that keeps me out of my head and continually returns me to the vision from which I paint; immersing me again and again in the environment from which it all stems.
In these first small format painting sessions I discovered ghost-like images emerging on them, as if on their own. I showed them to my husband and told him what I was seeing, and he said, “Like dreams, cetacean dreams.” Hence the name of this series! To me they really do conjure what the Humpback might perhaps see in her own dreams.
One of my goals in creating this new series is to present fine art, yet affordable original works for your consideration, as my Thank You for all your wonderful support over the years, and that also would serve to “Help Our OCEANS” through my LIVING OCEANS Donation Program. This goal appears to be well on the way to being met, yet I’ve also found something more.
If our Humpbacks do dream, as I think they must, and now having spent day after day amongst these visions, even watching as they seem to flow from my palette, through the living tissue of my own hands, then I think my dreams and theirs can merge (and perhaps yours with them) to create a vision of a bright future for them in the Oceans we share.
