Approaching Vibrancy at the Gallery at 14 Maple, Morristown, NJ

http://www.morrisarts.org/2018/02/27/gallery-at-14-maples-all-woman-artists-exhibit-approaching-vibrancy-opens-march-15-2018/

Two of my collages will be included in the Approaching Vibrancy exhibit at the Gallery at 14 Maple in Morristown, New Jersey. The open is Thursday evening, March 15, from 6:00-8:00. I am so excited about this!

I have learned so much in the past year, filling notebooks with small collages as a way to work out some poetic ideas (first with the Lavinia poems, then with the "ancient songs of us" poems). I'm still working on elements such as balance—but aren't we all? I have found collage artists whose work I admire, and I am trying to learn from them.

This little collage here is not one of the pieces in the exhibit, but it's one of my favorites. Hope to see friends at the opening! Hope to make new friends, too, and learn from the inspiring artwork.

beautiful the dead

beautiful the dead

this is what memory does best

anointing ordinary days

into something royal and rare

royal and rare but ours once

ours

all sundrenched and purple

and of course it is a lie

but not a lie

once memory

gets ahold of it and

and what is the past anyway

but a journey that no one

never

--jel 2-17-18

Green

One never knows where inspiration may be found. Take the beautiful green paper in this collage. A little darker than grass; a little lighter than forest. I saw this paper—yards of it, stuffed into a box—from across the Faculty Area at my school. I was busy preparing for a class and thinking about the work I needed to do for next week. But that green.

I took several minutes to smooth and carefully fold some of this paper whose color makes me feel as if it has been a long time since I've seen green. Starved for color, which is a symptom of February here in the northeast. Sometimes when we need beauty, beauty is there.

Green.

february

february

the paint when the water

the sky when the clouds

the page when the reader

the bird when the hedge

the sentence when the verb

***

the when

torn papers, metallic watercolor paint, ink