A Breath in the Void

I’m one of many artists who would give their soul to be Rothko and own the right to the amorphous color field painting style. What I wouldn’t do to spend my days working on huge canvases and laying down layer after layer of transparent color without a care to composition, image, line, or any of those other elements. Rightly so, I might take up chain smoking to give me something to do as I sit and sit and sit and contemplate the next fabulous color. This painting, and others in my abstract landscape series, speak to my adoration for Rothko and the simple beauty of a rectangle of breathing color. Yielding a bit more landscape reference and a hint of metallic paint, A Breath in the Void merges Rothko and Rilke, ahhh. I can’t wait to do another! The poem reads: A god can do it. But tell me how a person can flow like that through the slender lyre. Our mind is split. At the crossroads in our heart stands no temple for Apollo. Song as you teach us, is not a grasping, not a seeking for some final consummation. To sing is to be. Easy for a god. But when do we simply be? When do we become one with earth and stars? It is not achieved, young friend, by being in love, however vibrant that makes your voice. Learn to forget you sang like that. It passes. Truly to sing takes another kind of breath. A breath in the void. A shudder in God. A wind. Sonnets to Orpheus I, 3 A Breath in the Void, 36×36 in, oil on canvas, 2010 Sharon Kingston

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