online class, Exhibition Laurie Doctor online class, Exhibition Laurie Doctor

Secret Power of the Alphabet

A friend of mine, also faced with an exhibition deadline said:

…struggling with balance is where I feel the most tension.

That is it. How do you regain balance at those times, when all at once more than one important thing that you love demands the best of you? This is especially true now with all the compelling change in the world!

There is the additional complication of creative work— how the falling into it leaves you lost to the clock, obsessed and forgetful of other things. Then there’s the intensified difficulty that the maker’s work is never done, fueled by a consuming desire to do your best. ..

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Exhibition, painting Laurie Doctor Exhibition, painting Laurie Doctor

New Exhibition: Winter Seeds Promise

I thought about not posting today, not on this election day in the USA, (my practice being the first Tuesday of the month ), but then I thought what better time to hear Denise Levertov’s poem Concurrence that she wrote during another time of cultural upheaval — the Viet Nam War? What better time to be reminded that while there may be “madmen at the wheel” there is also the timeless faultless blue of a morning glory, or a bluebird, or sky. There is comfort in unexpected outbreaks of blue — like now, three bluebirds checking out the bluebird house — or a poem that takes hold, or returning to the mystery that holds us all on this giant ball spinning on its axis in endless space. There is comfort in the harvest moon that has returned for billions of years without hesitation or concern for our trials. There is possibility in every first sunlight.

Each day’s terror, almost
a form of boredom—madmen
at the wheel and
stepping on the gas and
the brakes no good—
and each day, morning-glories
faultless, blue, blue sometimes
flecked with magenta, each
lit from within with
the first sunlight

Concurrence |Denise Levertov

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