10 Year Anniversary: The Painting Diary 21 of 30

Painting Diary 21 of 30: Bearer of Light, 2017

This was painted live at Blessed Coast, in Squamish BC in 2016 but sat around unfinished for awhile. I drew the scene out roughly on the board before leaving and when I got there and set up my easel, the scene I had drawn in the background was strikingly similar to the festival grounds. There was even a crescent moon over the mountains that night. A major element to the festival that weekend was an honoring of the First Nation people of the area, so this piece felt very appropriate. 

I was after two things in this painting: I wanted to make a psychedelic totem pole and I wanted to honor the symbiotic relationship of two plants I would see growing all around my neighborhood in west Seattle; blackberry and morning glory. These two grew everywhere and almost always as a pair. The fragile morning glory vine was using the sturdy blackberry to climb higher and spread out into the sunlight. I’m not sure what the blackberry gets in return, except maybe the beauty of the flower and thus more bees.

Morning Glory has a lot of symbolism on its own and I believe the seeds can be psychedelic but that’s not why a choose to represent it here. I have had a long standing interest in blackberry and it appears in many of my paintings, and thats the main reason I chose these too plants.

The animals on the totem are eagle, which I stylized and it now looks more like an owl perhaps, and bear. The bear is holding a morning glory flower as a reminder that animals are as much apart of the symbiosis of nature as anything else. The piece is called Bearer of Light maybe because the bear is upholding this mysterious balance of nature, offering a reminder of the fragility of our natural world…

Bearer of Light, oil on board, 2017