I Will Survive…Smaller and Stronger

This is a piece that was born before my path to Orkney was a conscious thought. It has taken years to complete and just like all the personal encounters that make the title so revealing, it too has survived in concept and vitality. This is the first time this journey of landscapes, this life tale, this looking into those negative events that turned positive, well, it is the first time that this painting is able to be seen in its entirety. It is right that this painted story of nature alone, growing and confronting industrialization, and then collapsing back unto itself, ends where it started. In the final panel, it is fuller and hopefully stronger than it began. It is right that the painting and the painter have both taken so long to be seen publicly.The piece is all about the progress of a life. Whether it is my personal life or the life of a culture, or the life of the environment, well, I don’t think it matters.

The journey of this painting starts with pencil sketches created in 1979 after a dream house Victorian-wrap-around-porch-with-turret was to have been part of a first marriage. About 10 years later, after a year in Scotland, there was a fairy tale romance and marriage to a Scottish bagpiper. My husband encouraged me to put action behind the words "I paint." He gave me just the right easel. A friend needed some help with the rent for a new business/studio. But how could I paint large while living in an apartment? So I used that earlier drawing to create a potentially large piece made up of sixteen 16"x20" smaller panels. Color, paint, and versatility was now added to the story.

Over the next years, the boxes of these 16 panels followed me to many places and in many places I would ask "How am I going to hang this? Do you have a large enough wall?" Life, living spaces and what I am doing has changed. This is the third decade of living with this piece. My involvement with art and the creation of larger works is growing. My art, as you have seen throughout this website, is intertwined with the history of visits to Orkney (it seems I have returned to Orkney every ten years as well). With my discovery of digital technology and the high quality production of giclee prints for the growing popularity of my artwork, I saw a solution to the display and sharing of this piece.

This solution allows for great versatility. In a way, this versatility is the theme for us all. It is the resiliency that allows everything to learn. Seeing the story from left to right and starting at the top, I hope you too see the progression from simplicity and quiet to the middle hustle and bustle, the sharp conflict with the undulating horizons, and finally the resolution back to simplicity. The final landscape has been enlarged by its journey. It has not forgotten. It is now an integral part of the new landscape.

And now for the versatility of the viewer… If you only want a portion of this large panel, you can purchase an individual part (see side bar).

Jeanne