Bike Path Shadows

Bike Path Shadows is a work in progress. Six completed paintings are included in this book. Painted in sumi ink on rice paper with brush and pen, the conceptual images consist of shadows of foliage, figurative elements and architecture. These are the newest works in Ancestral Linkages.

The paintings of shadows are derived from actual reflections of trees on a bike path. The bike path runs behind my daughter and son-in-law’s home in Massachusetts. I often walk this bike path and on sunny days I am intrigued by the shadows of the foliage that ornament it. They are strikingly soft and beautiful in some places and intense and heavy in others.

Enveloped mentally and physically by the shadows a new body of work was developing in my mind in 2012. At that time a devastating illness had swept through my family. Synthesizing the illness with the shadows new work was generated using the shadows symbolically. A feeling of not having power in understanding and eradicating this unwelcome guest in our family made me
vulnerable to spiritual thought and meditation. In my drawings this spiritual intervention was given the physical form of existing gods and higher spirits from different religions. The imagery of gods represented higher energy I looked up to for strength and hope.

The horizontal shadows of the Bike Path, in most cases, were painted as vertically oriented reflections falling on rocks, caves, temples, in a grotto, on the edge of a wall, inside a cathedral, and on the ground. The shadows obscure and reveal imagery. They are at times in the background and at other times, domineering and the focal point of the picture. The composition is thus one of black and grey shadows and linear figurative imagery.

The work in this series continues.