The Colour of Distance

I didn’t actively choose this colour palette. It chose me.

A Payne’s gray monochrome palette met me where I was, and took me back to the basics. Liberated from colour choices, the shades, tones and tints highlight the ebbs and flows of my mental agonies, diluted paint reflect my tears, and mixed media and impasto speak to the layers of grief. I found strength in the range and power of my brushwork. I found the will to continue in the flow and movement of the paint. I found meaning in the ability to see, to feel, and to make art. I painted my way through despair; I painted through tubs of paint, through tears – lots of tears.

I began to think that the crying would never stop.

In time, after painting many panels that captured the blue of my amorphous grief, solace gradually found its way into my heart. “Not meant to be an answer,” as David Whyte says, solace is “a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part.”

I was finally able to look at the distance/s in my life and also those within me and see the beautiful blue. Rebecca Solnit poetically explains this scientific phenomenon as the blue light that got lost. With a shorter wavelength, the “light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us” and scatters.

And that is how I began to paint the “beauty of that blue that can never be possessed.” (Solnit)

**Discovery of Loss- Painting on panel, 12" x 16" - SOLD**

The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
― Rebecca Solnit

**Breaking Waves - Painting on canvas, 15" x 30" - SOLD**

“you broke the ocean in half to be here. only to meet nothing that wants you.” ― Nayyirah Waheed

**Lost - Painting on panel, 18" x 24" - SOLD**

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in. ― Rebecca Solnit

**Of Light - Painting on panel, 12" x 24" - SOLD**
I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.
But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'
All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

**Touch the Sky - painting on panel, 12" x 24" - SOLD**
Only from the heart can you touch the sky. - Rumi

**Where Shadows Go - painting on canvas, 15” x 30” - SOLD**
The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken, into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way to your future now but the way your shadow could take, walking before you across water, going where shadows go, no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass except to call an end to the way you had come, to take out each frayed letter you brought and light their illumined corners, and to read them as they drifted through the western light; to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that; to promise what you needed to promise all along, and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here right at the water's edge, not because you had given up but because now, you would find a different way to tread, and because, through it all, part of you could still walk on, no matter how, over the waves.
― David Whyte

Void and Fire 1, 2, 3 - painting on panel, 10” x 10” - SOLD

156. Why is the sky blue? -A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, "The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

― Maggie Nelson, Bluets