fog suite 4: amazon soil

Of all the colors from Benjamin Moore's 2021 trend palette, amazon soil was the most difficult for me to conceptualize its use in a painting.

Consequently, the amazon soil painting has only a hint of this color. Most people would describe the color of the painting as deep rich blues and I'm good with that. There is a bit of warm muddy purple in some of the shadows and as glaze on the night sky because I wanted to stay true to my original intentions with the series. However, there is no way that this painting screams purple to anyone.

Early on when deciding what to paint with each color, amazon soil spoke to me as a nocturne--a shadow color. An instagram post reminded me of how much I love and wanted to paint a moonlit moment and then this poem presented itself. Like many of the other poems that I've selected for the fog suites it speaks of dualities existing side by side: happiness and sadness, joy and grief, visible and invisible. And Naomi Shihab Nye has been a favorite poet since reading her poem 'kindness'.

So much happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.”

–Naomi Shihab Nye

"You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,

and in that way, be known.”