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Suzanne W. Churchill

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oil painting of a girl painting a landscape in front of a park bench

This is not a self-portrait. As an undergrad at Middlebury College in the 80s, I took an oil painting class. I was on my second or third sitting of a painting of this bench, when I arrived to find another painter had hijacked my perch. Rather than giving up, I saw back a few yards and painted her into my composition. Becaise I also had my hair in a short, brown pony-tail and was wearing a blue sweatshirt at the time, I was pleased by how much she looked like me. The fact that the figure is “not me” reveals my ambivalence about myself as an artist. Then, as now, I worry that I have technical skills, but no burning, original vision to make me “good enough” to be an artist. Yet when I dip my brush into paint, I feel a sensation similar to what Elizabeth Bishop describes in her poem “At the Fishhouses“:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Immersing yourself in a creative act—whether a painting or a blog post—generates a bone-aching sensation; it pulls you into a deep, mysterious core of knowledge, rooted in history yet fleeting as time.


Latest posts

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    “It is because of visiting forces that we suffer”
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    Oh the places they’ll build!

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