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The bodies of work in the Passage and For Others series of pastels and oil paintings all began with the pastel Passage, one. I was moved by this piece and kept thinking about it for months, as I worked on other paintings. I finally knew that I needed to explore Passage as a series and what evolved from that one pastel was to become a significant body of work over the next several years.
Passage and For Others paintings are interpretations of how I visualize breath. The scale of the largest paintings in the series For Others is a deliberate reference to myself. Each of the panels of the seventeen-foot wide oil on canvas triptychs are five-and-a-half feet by five-and-a-half feet; human scale, my height, my essence. Inspired by a meditation practice of forgiveness, each panel is breath. Breathing in the darkness, transforming it, and breathing out the light. Breathing in challenges and difficulties, and breathing out forgiveness. This meditation practice may seem counter-intuitive, but it is a profound form of meditation that has been a great gift in my life.
Like the For Others paintings, Passage is about breath. The lines evoke the gap between the in-breath and out-breath where transformation can occur. Again, breathing in the darkness, pausing, transforming it, and breathing out the light. In the For Others paintings the gap is portrayed with a literal gap between the panels of the triptych. In Passage it is the lines.
