Linen is the embracing, connecting fabric of every day… It is both mundane and familiar, ordinary and exquisite, and always leads our eyes and thoughts to the beauty of life…transcendent, timeless realities….it
connects us with countless generations of past families as we wash it to bright white, hanging it out the back, close to our homes… high on a hill…capturing the freshness of a new day and fragrance of the sun, the
earth and wind. It speaks of love.
We sleep soundly cocooned in it it, we clothe ourselves in it… with linen, we drape our windows and our homes, to warm our hearth, to filter the light and frame the outside view…
We wrap our new babies and our beloved dead in it. It sanctifies and dignifies, it frames, hides and reveals, it wraps itself around each day.
This is not only the fabric that connects so many precious daily details, it provides a metaphor for the continuously woven, complex threads from our beginning moments to our ending breath….the complex, textured fabric of a complete life.
‘Linen’ has provided a wealth of subject matter that presses on me to be painted. Each painting leads into the next, and the flow of the fabric wraps itself around each new idea. The shifting light sculptures the folds and
forms from shadow to light. The linen reflects glorious colour and also allows light to pass through the translucent fabric creating shimmering glowing luminosity.
This theme seems to have no end point and will continue to flow and weave its way through all of the possibilities until, it perhaps becomes thin, threadbare and finally torn away.
But not yet.
It wraps around a thousand more days, and poems yet to materialise…