BEAUTY and TERROR
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Book of Hours, I 59
Rainer Maria Rilke ( 1875-1926)

What a moment in time it has been. A moment that is both a standing still and a stretching seemingly endless into time. Our time that has been paused, stretched and warped. Also accelerated and pushed forward.
A time of Terror when we think of the , as of this date, 532K deaths of Covid19 in the world, the mishandling of the pandemic by our president and his cabinet and the ongoing murder of Blacks and People of Color in the US, which had it’s deep awakening in an unprecedented way with the murder of George Floyd

.
A time of Beauty when we moved into the “Stay at Home” phase and here in Seattle a wonderful quiet with which the whole world was suddenly, yet eerily blessed. Everything came almost to a standstill and we could all hear birds sing again, cross streets without traffic and our neighbours that we had never seen before came out of the ‘woodworks’, no longer tied to their desks or a treadmill. Our world got to take a breather from pollution and airplane traffic. Scientists were able to measure an incredible rebound of our stressed fauna and flora. People invented many new ways to connect and moved forward to help, encourage and lighten the load.

My shift from my, almost naked, full bodied tattooed women to these quiet faces, started before Corona hit us, but just by one or two paintings. Their tattooed messages, once more personal ,had transformed to a meaning much larger. I had really wanted to stretch my technical skills to see if I could pull off painting faces, portraits at a never before tried scale.

Painting by painting I got bigger, and curiously pushing me to my
largest size yet, when within 2 months I was asked to paint my first ever 8ft by 20ft mural. Working on the mural was both exhilarating and extremely stressful. As a woman , working with your back to the street in a neighboUrhood that has its rough edges, would be tense in regular times, but during the corona virus this was magnified, as folks would
come up close, kicked down or disregarded my barrier material or where simply showing their disgruntlement at having to move to the side.
Despite that, I would absolutely welcome another opportunity to do another one and let art rule the streets of Seattle.

The poem Beauty and Terror by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke had caught my attention before the pandemic hit and has since then been carried into several paintings. I wanted this show to have both images of serene quiet and a stark bluntness exemplified by the women with shaven, tattooed skulls.

Each of them resonates with me in these times of both peace and violence, quiet and uproar. One thing is for sure, we will never forget this moment and carry it onward to the end of our life. I hope that each painting holds some of this time, in which the world’s beauty and terror seem more heightened than ever.

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