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The Bird of Peace
The Bird of Peace
Flies high above
The cares of daily life,
And drops its seeds and
Leaves
With gracious ease,
In unknown seas and
Lands
Planting unseen stirrings
Among differing hands
Giving unto Earth
An everlasting birth
Catinka Knoth
12/21/2009
My series of fantasy landscape blocks will be in an exhibit of landscape art here at Lincoln Street Center in Rockland Maine for the month of December. The opening reception is December 5th, 3-6 pm. This group show takes place at the Jean Chalmers Gallery. You can read the article about the "XX" Landscapes at Lincoln Street Exhibit.
There is a story to these mixed media blocks, which I made back in 1985? I used to live by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel in New York City. One year they were re-landscaping it. I salvaged these blocks, ends of 2 x 8 planking that had been used to build something in the new design. I was always on the lookout for pieces of wood suitable to paint my fantasy landscapes on - like the old tempera paintings from Medieval times. Painting landscapes inside of broken crockery or small boxes was another format for my art. My favorite blue calico earthenware china, being earthenware, was subsceptible to easy breakage by playful cats. When a mug broke just in half, it seemed a good fit for a landscape inside, like a peephole Easter egg. Another version was a miniature paper mache window/box painted in the blue calico pattern.
There were also fantasy landscapes on canvas in mixed media collages using gift wrap paper of Medieval patterns. The blocks range from collages of these gift wraps, to papers I hand painted first in the blue calico, then in simpler calico floral patterns of my own designs. I wanted to create the effect of looking through a hole of the broken edges of china into another world. It's also a bit like looking through curtains.
At the entrance to most tunnels we cannot see the light at the end. We will only enter that tunnel if we have faith somewhere that there is a light at the end of it, or that we can find our way back out where we came from. And certainly only children might believe that we can dig a tunnel through the earth to China. And yet....
Would you like to see cards of these blocks?
You can see a collection of Blue Calico China from England at Amazon.
