duststorm, acrylic on canvas, 12x36"
Just like in my dream, an enormous cloud of dust in seen thundering across a golden desert valley… It isn’t often that a painting really comes out the way you envision it will. I got lucky this time! It came to me in a dream along with a few other images that have yet to reincarnate themselves in paint. Over the past few months I’ve been experiencing an explosion of creative energy. I dream it, it literally wakes me in the middle of the night, and will not let me go back to sleep. I stumble upstairs in to my studio and I paint. It is like I have no say or control over it. It just wills itself into existence. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced as an artist.
echo, acrylic on canvas, 40x30"
My painting echo began last year, before I got pregnant. I had named it after Echo Canyon in Zion National Park. It was the last canyon I explored before putting those adventures on hold for a while. There is a place in Echo Canyon called the echo chamber. The walls are deep here and they move in and out like an endless hourglass for several hundred feet. The opening at the top is narrow and only a sliver of sky is revealed above you. Every sound that occurs here vibrates and repeats until it fades into silence. If only I had a beautiful voice, I would have sung my loveliest of love songs there. As it was, all I could do was release a howl! As the sound repeated itself again and again, it brought a smile to my soul.
This painting lay in a state of neglect in my studio for months, until one night last week, awoken again in the middle of the night, I placed it back on the easel and transformed it into what you see now. How I ache for the sound of water dripping, a loose rock falling, or the approaching of wind that sounds like water rushing towards you. I hold on to the memories, the echo, until I can be there again…
Bonnie Kelso
Artist/Adventurer
My web site: www.bkelso.com
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