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POEM-PAINTINGS

Words became the subject of my paintings in 2006 when I was invited to collaborate with my husband, the poet Gregory Orr, an exhibit on the theme of "love". At that time Greg was working on a sequence of poems that fit the gallery' theme of love perfectly and I made a series of grid-based paintings using Greg's poems for subject-matter. I wanted to make paintings, not posters of poems. What that meant to me was that the formal attributes of painting-light, space, color, surface -were the means of structuring the composition. The fact that a painting is made up of color and brush strokes and oil paint was more important than that the texts be legible, although I did want to honor the poems to the extent that it was possible to decipher them if one tried hard enough. In this set of paintings, legibility was secondary to the painting's formal qualities.

In 2009 I diagnosed with a serious illness and my relationship to the poems changed. I'd always admired them, but during my illness and treatment I came to feel that the poems gave me the courage, faith, and hope necessary to live vitally, not just to survive passively.

To honor my new understanding of the poems, I repainted some of the earlier poem-painting canvases so the texts were easier to read, bolder and more graphic, though still concerned with painterly surface. Then I began to work on new paintings based on the poems I loved most. I decided to use the format of a flag and conceptualized these new paintings as "prayer flags"-a combination of the Buddhist prayer flag which incorporates a healing message and a nation's flag which proclaims allegiance, a banner under which I could gather my spiritual and emotional forces.