Living the Questions

Living the Questions, 30 x 30, oil on canvas

I created this painting last Fall.  It has been at a Seattle gallery for the past few months and I’ll be bringing it and another 6 paintings back to my studio this weekend.  The Seattle gallery was not a good fit for my work.   But as an emerging artist, I guess this experience had to be lived so that I would understand what is important to me as I move forward with entrusting others to represent my work.

The Rilke writing that inspired this painting is a favorite of mine. I have found myself returning to these words often, and consequently created two paintings inspired by them.  As an artist, I am continually struggling to manifest on canvas through globs of paint  the “something” inside me.  And as I do, I inevitably unearth another unknown, so that the process continues–questions unfolding onto new questions.  I believe that the beauty of being immersed in your craft and living a mindful life–and the true advantage of working on a creative endeavor.  These words also serve to remind me to carry on.  It is through the work and the living that meaning is revealed.  I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language.  Don’t dig for answers that can’t be given you yet, you cannot live them now.  For everything must be lived.  Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answers.   Rainer Maria Rilke

Here are the other paintings that will be back in my studio (and at artwalk this month).

What you cannot Hold, 24×30

The Far Places Within Me, 30 x 30

Like Mist from Unhurried Clouds, 30 x 30

Too Vast to be Contained, 30 x 40 in

Nimbus Grey, 50 x 70

Like Mist from Unhurried Clouds, 30 x 30

#paintingsandpoetry #readingrilke