"You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength"
Marcus Aurelius
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| Eureka CA...my place for being |
Intermission
Last week, my journey from the madness of our daily life, created by our Nation's new course of leaving a two hundred and fifty years of Democracy and Constitutional rule, I found a few moments of reflective interaction, an intermission if you will, with the artists now on exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art.
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| The Starlings |
Matt Devine's sculpture captures the inner wanderings of his emotional ties to his environment of Oregon's unspoiled nature and the beauty of just being. His work, an abstraction of the flora and fauna on his walks are translated into steel and aluminum. The overlay of layers of the long and beautiful strands of steel bring rhythmic dancing shadows enchanting to the viewer. As I moved around the sculptures, the enchantment caused a Mind Meld that caught me in an endless embrace. “The Starlings”, flying across the vast end of the gallery, soared with a wonder of flight and lightness of the birds and belied the heaviness of steel.
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| A path in Matt's world "Walk with Me" |
There was a video entitled, Walk with Me. I sat on the designated bench and watched with remembrance of when I lived in Eureka CA. Often, I walked paths in the Great Sequoia Forrest and felt a great solace of peace. The Music of Nature is our greatest treasure, and Matt has given us a look of his paths translated into permanent works of Art.
Mary Jhun
The other artist that was deeply relevant for me is Mary Jhun. Her paintings of the mind numbing experience of wearing a C-pap for sleep apnea. The paintings haunted me with memories of my husband wearing this machine to keep him breathing through the night. He hated it, and called it Damascus...
Mary Jhun however, painted this machine which took away her dreams in surreal elements of color and exquisite detail of her mind intertwined with the parts of the machine. I was stunned by the recognition of what my husband had tried to tell me about his experience with this machine, but his telling was told in terms of computerize...Her journey of living with this device became the vehicle of her finding dream painting. The images are profoundly beautiful and giving this viewer a greater understanding of how machines can not only be life saving but, a telling of stories to the public of how one person's experience brings the realization of a new and wondrous path to create art.
