Tag: oilpainting

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END_PAINTINGS

End Paintings
by Adrian Johnston August 2 – 30, 2021

Newton Free Library 330 Homer Street, Newton, MA 02459

Newton Free Library Logo


T. S. Eliot said, “to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” 2019 felt like the end of a season and, 2021 a new vantage point by which to evaluate, fuse into orbit fragmented pieces of changing season, history, experience and memory. These works deal in various forms with “the end,” but also with the space between the end and the beginning. They are in part a product of the Adrian Johnston’s quarantine labors to integrate past-present-future—painting is a means to live forward today in light of what is past.

Contact Adrian: m@kmov.org

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An Active Heaven in an Earth in Turmoil

Once upon a time, there was no separation between the heavens and the earth…. The atmosphere was no shelter from the violence of storm weilding angels, with thunder in their robes, while earth’s trees gave shelter to terrifying visions of milk white cherubs. When nature is red in tooth and claw, then heaven is black and blue and rimmed with fire.

RUBENS, Peter Paul
(b. 1577, Siegen, d. 1640, Antwerpen)

The Martyrdom of St Livinus
1633
Oil on canvas, 455 x 347 cm
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
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BREATHE

The Way In
Linda Hogan

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.

Sometimes the way in is a song.

But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,

and beauty.

To enter stone, be water.

To rise through hard earth, be plant

desiring sunlight, believing in water.

To enter fire, be dry.

To enter life, be food.

Adrian Johnston. "Breath" Oil on Linen (detail).
This painting is an in-process work, perhaps about the way breath enters a body, using images of wind and fire, book and tree. (Detail) Oil on Linen, 48 x 60 in.

This poem can be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55761/the-way-in and more of Linda Hogan’s poetry at https://www.lindahoganwriter.com/

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