Remember You are Dust

One of the first things I remember learning as a child was the concept of patterns. Teachers seemed to be impressed when you could identify one– circle, circle, star, square; circle, circle, star, square. When I was older, they used the same concept but in the service of math; on standardized tests we’d have to guess what number would fulfill the established patterns.

All of them precise, measured, intentional. And I loved them for it.

Now as an adult, I still find myself searching for patterns, although they don’t tend to stay in nice little rows anymore. I’ve learned to look for them in the ways I’ve viewed the world, the relationships I’ve kept, the ones I’ve let go. I’ve found them in my greatest despairs and brightest hopes. Always, I can find this burning desire to belong right next to this other burning desire: to be different. And together these two often combative desires have carried me like a rhythm in the song of my life.

When I started exploring patterns in my art, I knew they would have to be layered. Unlike the elementary school workbooks or high school math tests, there would be no precision to them. I used stencils but let them shift on the surface of the canvas. I put wet paint on top of wet paint. No shapes stayed perfectly within their plastic borders. Some patterns covered up other patterns. Some got completely lost. I didn’t know where it was all headed. I just knew, like the birds that flit about my imagination, they’d take me somewhere.

In this piece, I was thinking about how patterns that exist outside of us also exist inside of us. When I was a teenager, a holy person once asked me to consider the cosmos– the stars, and the planets around me. Everything that is going on out there, is going on in here, he said, pointing to his chest.

I’ve never forgotten those words, that idea that I was intricately connected to a beautifully patterned universe– that the lines of my thumbprint look very much like the rings in the stump of a hundred year old oak tree or that both rivers and trees branch out into smaller and smaller versions of themselves as do our very own veins. We are individual. We are collective. The tension in my longings exists in nature, too.

I named this painting “Remember you are Dust and to Dust you Shall Return” an expression I grew up saying every Ash Wednesday as a minister smudged dirt on my forehead, an expression I recall often when I stare out into the natural world, wondering how it might be possible to be part of it– its magic, its wholeness, its impermanence, its mystery.

The original of this painting made its way to Nashville, Tennessee in the back of my mini van, a journey you can see in the instagram video below. Prints are now available.