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Ten New Songs
a tribute to Leonard Cohen

As the tall white canvases filled my studio, I saw there were ten and they felt like songs.  Cohen’s album of 2001 was, as usual, full of mystery, sensuality, spirit and longing. Every album of his seemed to come to my attention at a time when those words and those tunes were exactly right for the time and what I was experiencing.  The honesty of the words are transformative in and of themselves.  It took a couple months to be happy with the pairing of the paintings with his poetry, looking for the stanzas that matched my inner mood during the process of painting.  I learned how much imagination is in me when I work. I found though I'm an abstract intuitive artist, interested in aesthetics, transcendence and immediacy, there ARE places of reference, story, meaning.  This has altered me and helped me embrace the inevitable bits of recognizable "realities" that come when you create a variety of shapes.  

I also call these works "the inklings" because they all start with allowing acrylic ink to flow and drip before adding the white lines or the structures.

 

© 2022 by Wendy Stegall.

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