Earth Tongue Studio @ Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca NY. August 2021. Photo credit: Chris Pawlowski
The animals were beautifully received at Moosewood. The staff loved them and said they enlivened the place! And so many compliments from strangers, emails, inquiries, and I sold two paintings! I’ve been asked to show again for May and June 2022, a two monther! So as soon as my seasonal irrigation business is over, I will be LIVING in my studio! Ha!
I have been invited to show the animals at the world famous Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, NY, for the month of August, 2021. My last show there was in 2005, a dual show with my Grandfather Karl Schantz. I know he is smiling from the spirit side about this new round in such a great space.
Some of my earliest memories are from Moosewood! It was much smaller in it’s early years, with repurposed barn boards for walls and houseplants and cactuses enjoying the window light. That’s what I remember— warm glow and green, great food and friends.
I am so excited to be returning with the herd!
The oldest cave painting modern humans have found is in Borneo, painted more than 40,000 years ago. Bison held our earliest spark of inspiration and led us to grind minerals, burn charcoal, and paint by firelight in deepest darkness of caves. Pigment mingled and held with the moisture of rock, as our own fire-lit shadows danced with painted animals.
Can you see it?
I have a sense of awe in understanding that we have been making images for more than 40,000 years. In Chauvet cave in France there is a series of overlapping bison. Scientists have carbon dated these beasts in paint, discovering that the first was rendered 5,000 years before the last. These paintings give us a sense of belonging on Earth in a deep time scale that we can hardly fathom in our present. We make art as a progression of our souls—as our own sacred hall of records. And it all began in a cave of dreams.
When I make art in connection with animal spirits, I shape shift. I straddle the body of another while maintaining my own. This doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it is astounding. I remember drawing a mountain gorilla and I was drawing the delicate, transitioning folds of light and shadow around his eyes and felt with total clarity that as I was creating him, he was creating me. We shared a stream of energy, and though we would part independently again, we would be forever changed. My own paintings become a sacred hall of records.
This painting, “The Dreaming” is a reflection on our belonging here on Earth. I traveled a deep time tunnel to meet bison in the caves, painted by an ancestor in firelight, and felt the bison cave painting come to life and begin a journey into the unknown. During ice ages our planet shape-shifts, land bridges form and migrations become possible. It is thought that this is how both bison and humans came into North America. Water turned to ice and pulled back, exposing a land bridge of 500 miles between what we have named Siberia and Alaska. The bison came across first—between 195,000-135,000 years ago. Humans possibly crossed the bridge 15,000 years ago, walking into a land filled with mystery and mega-fauna, of wooly mammoths and scimitar cats and dire wolves. We followed the land and free running water, hunting animals and gathering plants and spreading into territories which had never been depressed by human feet.
In this moment, there is a deep polarization between human beings and Earth. This is my deepest grief. I have always felt I belonged as an Earth creature and yet, as I experience my human world, I feel the discouragement that our species made a devastating turn at a crucial cross-road. Traveling down the time tunnel in paint and imagination has helped, tingling the ancestral taproot of belonging. This painting is a prayer that we continue to imagine, to dance in firelight with the animals, and to cross the threshold in the spiral of time and find ourselves home.
The fox has emerged! She is the shapeshifter, able to melt in and out of the construct of our world. She understands the space between the forms that we call "earth", "tree", "root", "air", and appears and disappears in the light and shadow. Fox started showing up for me at the ending of my marriage. We go through many shape-shifts in our lives, and this was a BIG one for me. So glad that I was visited during that time in my life- a reminder that there is a cycle happening always, a movement of matter and time and distance, a shifting of cells into something new.
A few days ago I was painting so badly that I was laughing at my canvas. Every color I chose was horrible. I am laying down the ground for a new fox painting, finding the movement in the under-layers which I will paint on top of so there is only an impression of what lies beneath.
The next day was better. I was painting by 8am, feeling good, making better, simpler choices and moving paint around the board. My friend Enzo (8 years old and Annalee Dunn's son!) had overheard Annalee and I talking on the phone about fox spirit medicine and had made a drawing while we talked. She sent me the image of his incredible work! Hours later, my friend Star Joyce Ladd sent me an image she had created of a woman with a fox-like head resting atop her head, and I was astounded at the similarities between these two foxes! The fox is a shapeshifter, which is a mysterious thought, and as I painted I kept returning to the sentence, "The fox is somehow using the mosaic to shapeshift", and my eyes would turn to the window and see how even the tree branches against the blue sky create a mosaic.
Enzo’s Fox!
Star Joyce Ladd’s Fox!
I had been painting on a makeshift table so the painting could lie flat, and then decided to move it to the easel. Once there, I decided to flip it upside down and as soon as I did, CRASH!!! The globe light in the center of the room smashed and glass fell all around me. I ran out of the room and shut the bedroom door so my dog Luna wouldn't come in, and I started cleaning up. There was glass in every corner of the room-- I mean EVERYWHERE. But strangely, none on me and my head had been maybe 3 feet from the light. And none on my art table, though it managed to get under it. I felt sure this was a message about my painting, and only when I swept up the pile did I get it. Another mosaic. There is still huge mystery with this idea, but I think we are all onto something....
The glass shatters… and a mosaic appears!
The animals have spent 3 months in Woodstock Healing Arts in Woodstock, NY. They feel right here-- and they align with the healing spirit of the place. For indeed, each was created in connection with an animal spirit as a teacher and a healer. It has been a beautiful experience to be part of the wheel of this exceptional place of healing and community education.
https://woodstockhealingarts.com
The show will be up until late April, 2018! Hope you get the chance to enjoy the paintings and to have a healing session with one of the 21 practitioners whom work in a wide spectrum of modalities at this wonderful place!
My first solo painting show is coming up! I am nervous and excited. I feel like a watered seed, my life force heading toward sunlight.
