We’d been drawn to the beauty of the shell. We’d seen the beads in museum cases strung into belts. We read in dusty books about the uses of the belts to record important events. We lived in a town that was home to people of the Nation of the Wampanoag, and they had just been through a grueling battle for federal recognition, which they won.
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I have been documenting summer tourists who frequent the beaches of Aquinnah, MA since 1988. Mathilda is a subject I have documented since our chance acquaintance on July 30, 1997.
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If We Can Just Stand Still…Quiet
Enough To Hear Singing…A Message
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An idea grew in my mind to make a quilt that was like a painting. The center is based on a series of abstracted landscape paintings that I had done, but instead of greens and blues, my mind was craving orange and reds—hence, the Dalai Lama and Rothko because of the color block imagery. The border is a spiral of contrasting scraps.
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I did this small painting from my studio window at the end of a cold November day. I had been working on another much larger painting all day and was getting ready to stop. The dogs wanted their supper. Looking out the window I was moved by the angles of the clouds,the shades of grey and that wedge of orange.
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Since there is no sunset in Iceland in late May, there can be no sunrise. It stays light all night long. Yet when my husband and I went out at 4:30 AM, the small Lutheran church was silhouetted against a bank of glowing clouds.
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My intention was to document the impact of the algae bloom on the pond. Although the beauty of the pond came through at that moment, I am concerned about the increasing pressure from development around the pond. I hope the work may increase awareness of the problems associated with nitrogen runoff and pollution at this fragile estuary.
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The current paintings seem to be devoid of an image. However, their source came from an image in nature, and a number of landscapes done in 1990. I held on to one, a small painting done at the edge of the Great Pond looking out thru some reeds. It was somehow still giving back information to me.
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