A haunting blue evokes my muse… an elusive blue that moans in memories halls, summoning images from the liminal regions of my imagination, sparkling like fireflies over a southern marsh.

To begin an egg tempera painting like Evening Magic, I need to tap into something greater than me. Taller than the trees, higher than the walls, stronger than words contrived to constrain my boundless spirit.

I roam aquamarine and rocky shores, unrolling the films stored in my visual memory bank. I snip a scene here, a moment there — color and light everywhere.

In the studio by candlelight I slip on my Bose, maybe play Anna Calvi and let her voice sweep me away on Hunter. One more taste. One more time… I open the door wide.

Liquid blue surrounds my muse in an island sea, and frames her body in mountain mist. She smiles in sunshine, and when daylight fades she slips into sheer cotton, burns candles at her feet and sways in twilight music.

“I just want to be alone.” She confesses. “I’ve had a good life.”

One should not tell another how to be.

Blue rides a dark horse on a jungle trail, it bathes in a valley stream, and curls in cashmere beside a crackling wood fire. Blue swirls and hangs in memory like smoke caught in frozen winter air.

It’s a summer evening in another life on the lawn of a dead man’s mansion. An old blues man plays on the stage under a white tent. A full moon rises above BB King’s head, the music is hot, dew paints droplets of silver in the grass. Afterwards we walk through a forest of flowers, golden lanterns like fireflies guide our way.

Have I forgotten all I know about painting? Forgotten what love is? Why do rocks and trees no longer hold their allure? Or maybe I seek truth in secret places. It’s the root and marrow, not the fleeting flower or smile that bears the substance of life.

I walk in sunshine and starlight and hear the humming of a deeper music. No thing is titled by an adjective or noun. Unnamed colors marry a tribe of emotions. I see beyond coasts and clouds, forms resound from a distant consciousness, coming like the sound of a faraway night train. I’ve got my ear to the ground, trying to decipher an ancient code.

No one can tell another how to sing a tune only they can hear. Let your soul be the conductor of the beautiful chorus of your life.

Anna, you sing nothing lasts. Anna tell me, how do you paint the memory of blue?

Memories meld into dreams, swirl like carnival cotton candy on a vendors machine. Lights rise from the mystery of my conscious. There was dancing and laughter and sparklers in the night.

And all these things made Evening Magic.

Live by the Sea, Love by the Moon

Ideas for paintings come as an image or word. Fourteen years ago, I walked the beach in the moonlight when these words suddenly came into my head, live by the sea, love by the moon.

Maybe once I heard them spoken or read them somewhere. I don’t know. But knew instantly I wanted to do a painting. A great one. I sketched out ideas, quite literal ones; a house overlooking the ocean with moonlight coming through the windows, a couple by the shore… each one drawn and discarded.

The years passed with their inevitable sorrows and joys, and I would return to it with a new depth of experiences as my work continued to evolve. Always reaching deeper, seeking to go beyond the apparent reality of things and embrace their essence. What is Art for if not to probe the mystery of our souls? The divine spark that makes each of us unique beings.

In morning and moonlight I return to the beach. My feet walk the waters edge, my mind sails with poets and prophets; Rumi, Rilke, Oliver, Neruda and Gibran. I am with you, my friends. In the world but not of the world. My humble desire to leave behind for future humans how it felt to be alive during our era.

I dive below the material distractions, tunnel under concrete, computers and celebrity culture and dine with sages of ancient civilizations. I feast on saltwater, sailing clouds and windswept dunes. Perched on granite bedrock gazing upon the vast Atlantic opens my mind to previous unfathomable depths. I am this and this is me. Though we each are changing, you are the eternal one.

We humans are like pebbles rolling around on the shore. Fates waves toss us into each other in the ocean of our lives. Sometimes we part without a mark or only minor scars upon our surface. And if we are fortunate, we are cracked open to our core, carved with new insights and understandings. Perhaps compassion blooms.

Yes, like you, I’ve been cracked open a time or two. As a result my work has climbed to a new level. Or perhaps its slipped into an abyss of understanding. A new-found purity of inspiration and clarity of vision. Now paintings emerge unbidden from a lifetime of associations, experience, imagination and memory.

Inspired with new knowledge I set a large canvas on the easel. A great white space of possibility and uncertainty. Some nights with the lights down low, I sat in my chair and with headphones on study the looming surface in half light. I let the music take me to a place of memory and magic. I see the ocean, clouds swirling and rising and every moon I had ever seen illuminating the water.

Picking up a brush I swirl it in ultramarine blue. The word ultramarine comes from the Latin ultramarinus “from beyond the sea.”  I let my mind travel there, and I immerse in the saline waters I’ve known all my life.

I finished the painting in time for my solo show at Hughes gallery in January. It is a very large painting and needs the right space, the right person as all paintings do. But they will come together as all things meant for each other do.

Gallery owner Barbara Hughes wrote these lovely words.

Singularly, the most strikingly beautiful and impactful painting we’ve ever exhibited at Hughes Gallery.- Barbara Hughes

Live by the Sea, Love by the Moon.

It all comes down to living and loving.