Artnotes: How Broad Life is

Tulip   Laurie Fox Pessemier   Acrylic/paper  23.5 x 17"   60 x 43cm  275.00

It’s hard to eclipse the ECLiPSE for news this week.  It was a non-event in Europe, where we didn’t have as much as a blink, but as my heart is often in the USA, I paid attention. The eclipse has always been a major event in my life.  I experienced a total solar eclipse with friends, Yo and Del, in Eastern Washington state in 1979.  It was a moment of big change in my life:  I had just moved to Seattle, and my serious adult life had just started.  A couple of months later I met Blair and my life was changed forever.   Blair and I experienced our next solar eclipse together in Paris, France in 1994.  It was May, and the eclipse could be seen through the arch of the Arc de Triomphe.  To view the eclipse, I had built a box camera, the only one on the street, it seemed, and a photographer took my picture for the newspaper.  We joined another hundred-some thousand people on the Champs Elysees, and while it wasn’t a total eclipse it was enough to catapult our lives into Europe.   Our most recent (partial) eclipse viewing was in 2017, while we were vacationing at Hemlock Lodge in Winsted, Connecticut.  It marked the last summer we visited with my Dad.  I watched the progress of the eclipse through the shadow of the leaves on the tree near the porch. Cherry Tree    Blair Pessemier  Acrylic/canvas  16 x 12"  40 x 30 cm  450.00 While I know all of these events are the result of science and mathematics, there is a certain mysticism about them, too.  Maybe it just draws our attention, and in the words of Ram Dass, make us “Be Here Now”. It preserves the experience in amber.    Blossoming  Laurie Fox  Pessemier   Acrylic/cardboard  20 x  27.5 "   50 x 70cm  375.00    Right now, I am shifting my focus slightly from painting to writing.  I have been making poems that I hope to put into book form this summer.  I am finding so much inspiration in nature, from wild flowers to my dog; experiences with people and memory.  I continue to be astonished at how broad life is, and the turns it can take.  Lilacs   Laurie Fox  Pessemier   Acrylic/paper 17 x 23.5"   43 x 60cm  275.00