About the Art: The Art of Painting

I have always been inspired by strokes of paint.  As a child visiting the National Gallery in Washington, DC with my Mother, I was enchanted by the paintings on the wall thick with textural illusion and enigmatic smiles.  Each canvas connects ideas, emotions, experiences all in a line; as though ordering a disordered world. 

My early relationship with paintings caused the seed of an idea to grow in me. ” I will do that,” my heart breathed in the quiet place.  As for me, I shall have real art around me, I shall fill space with it.  I shall get my hands filthy with it.

Paint is made up of bits of earth and plant oil.  Art is earthy; it stains your hands, and seeps through and stains your soul, crossing the membrane between what is material and what is not. The art of painting is raw.  Burning your eye and your spirit like the searing contrast of the lavender ribbon that runs along the branch in the dead of winter only to turn into resonant golden ochre at the tip of the limb.   The artist is the transistor in the radio, the canary in the coal mine, the maligned prophet.  The artist takes this role all in order to say true things, in order to create resonance, harmony, and joy.

Art makes a way.

-Artist Rebecca King Hawkinson