Bringing poetry into in my creative process

I’ve been enjoying exploring poetry in recent months. I love finding poems that resonate deeply or express experiences in ways that move me. And I love it when I find a poem that expresses through words something that I was trying to express through the painting I created, as happened with these collections:

The title for my Practice Losing Farther, Losing Faster comes from a line in a poem called One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. I love how the poem speaks to themes of loss and grief being an ordinary and everyday part of our lives, and the value in embracing that.

My Suspended Blue Ocean collection was inspired by a day spent hiking and swimming at Nanjizal Beach in Cornwall, UK, where I felt so alive, free, strong, and connected to both the vitality in nature and my own vitality, aliveness, and delight. Hafiz’s poem titled, A Suspended Blue Ocean speaks about deep connection to nature, the call to play, and the possibility of spiritual transcendence, so “Suspended Blue Ocean” felt like the perfect title for this series.

The title for You Are Not Surprised At The Force of the Storm was inspired by Rilke’s poem, Onto a Vast Plain. For me, this artwork always felt like a powerful storm rolling in, yet the composition has a sense of balance and harmony and peace; a calmness and knowing. The artwork and the poem both had me thinking of several times when I’ve received bad news that I somehow had intuitively known was coming, despite there being no way to have known. I was able to find some peace in accepting the futility of resistance and surrender instead, trusting that perhaps the fact that I’d known it was coming might mean there’s some purpose and meaning in the storm, and all is well.

Below is “How Many Kinds of Love 3“, one of a collection of small mixed media abstract paintings on paper, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem, “On the beach.” Oliver’s poem speaks of the imagery of sea, stones, and light evident in my paintings, and I love the theme of our connection to nature and her signature sense of awe at witnessing nature that she conveys in this poem.