​Do we really need 
excuses 
to pause 
and recognize beauty? 
No matter. 
It’s here 
whether we notice.
In full view 
of our distracted 
eyes and mind. 
An available refuge,
amid anxious chatter
to center us, 
a clarion amid the mud 
to awaken our 
slumbering souls.
Requiring so little:
rapt attention, focus
beyond our selves,
the sincerity of a moment’s
genuine engagement,
briefly excusing time. 
She offers unnameable rewards.
Simple yet profound, 
all around 
accessible, yet 
all too rarely accessed.
Like love. 
 


Alley Puddle, March 25, 2020

I love this moment in the year. The rosemary flowers are overflowing, the apricot tree is in full bloom, the pear blossoms on the way; suddenly in my long dormant yard I’m seeing all sorts of new mini-onion stalks and leaves and tiny fuchsia-colored flowers peeking up. Dandelion yellows are bursting open and the purple dead nettle buds begin to emerge. Thanks to the recent time change, the sun was still hovering near the horizon when I got home, allowing me time to clean my brush, change out of my dirty dusty paint clothes, wander into my yard and dig into real dirt. There’s nothing like the feel of soft garden soil on a not-quite-yet-spring March evening. 

I’ve been tending these beds for several years. A few years ago, after the consecutive new seed sprouts were nibbled down by critters (rabbits, groundhogs, deer), I finally resigned to putting fencing around (and for deer atop) the plots and beds. It paid off, and, as I heard no complaints, I assume the critters managed to find enough other tasty green things to nibble on. 

In response to the last few warm days the hearty kale that overwintered is now in a full-stride growth spurt. I loosened the soil around it and carefully spread the tiny pinhead-sized kale seeds. I sifted a few shovels of the compost pile onto a screen and the “harvest” provided plenty of lightweight fertile umber cover for the seeds. In another bed, I lightly stroked the soil with a hand pick, happily crumbled clumps with my fingers, and leveled the patch with my palms. The rich earth was still warm having absorbed the energy of the beautiful day. I’m not sure if the bed or my hands more enjoyed the massage.

I gently brushed the dirt to create several shallow rows and attentively spaced the beet and spinach seeds in their respective troughs. Despite not knowing what the future months will bring, there’s something very hopeful in the act of folding just enough soil over seeds, nestling them in. It’s like tucking a beloved little one in bed with a familiar blanket, as the full moon begins to wane.

It was a tumultuous previous year, full of hard work, wondrous surprises, and growth in many directions. On this balmy evening, as I sat on my rump in the grasses and plants of my backyard, I noticed a dutiful honey bee collecting spring pollen. In a familiar old cycle, as our world hurls yet again around a faraway star, the earth is into a fresh start, and a new beginning is upon us. The sun beamed a magical golden glow on everything in sight. Today, the soil in these little plots that I tend felt especially fecund, perhaps renewed by the tough year before.  Despite all the frenzy swirling about us right now, it feels full of promise, grateful. Me too.

www.johnwiercioch.com

“Transitions” 44” x 44” Mixed Media/panel
[On view April,2020 in the exhibition “Rivers, Mountains, & Magic: Embracing the Mystery” @ Alexander / Heath Contemporary, 5th & Campbell, Roanoke, VA]

Lately, navigating transitions seems the stuff of life. It may be changes of profession, expectations within one’s work, or within one’s self, or changes in a relationship, adapting to loss, moving where one lives, even adjusting to the seasons. I’m learning to accept that life is rarely static and adapting to the shifts is an unending process. 

Shapes dominate some of my paintings. Areas emerge that become specifically defined. There may be dozens of little bits, or a work may be divided into grid like sections, or a few large shapes may clamor for attention. Sometimes in our lives we manage to accumulate responsibility for a myriad of small tasks — we know what they are, find brief moments to take conscious breaths, and manage to get through a day/week/months attending to them without much room to think. At the end of such times, we look back and all those pieces have come together in a beautiful mosaic-like fashion. At other times we might get the option to arrange and order things in a regularized way, create an expected order and neatly schedule our duties and joys. In other phases of life, a few large priorities might come boldly to the fore. These times oblige a certain restraint as these issues establish the re-direction and composition of our lives. It may even be just one thing, settling in to a new home, or a tragedy, or attending to the health of a loved one, that may suddenly require all of our focus and attention. Amid these times we might crave the option to have room for the “rest” of our lives — in all meanings of the word.

Then there are those slightly discomforting in-betweens; those inevitable periods of transition. The times where we’re headed into something different, new, a moving beyond, often into an unknown or unknowable. It seems natural that we may feel apprehensive or anxious relinquishing the familiar. Complex creatures that we are, as is well documented, we crave habits to such a degree, that sometimes even when a situation is not joyful or unhealthy, we may still resist change. 

When I am painting, at a certain point a dialogue develops with each work. It’s unpredictable if this connection will evolve quickly or take much meandering, effort, “conversation.” Sometimes I can sense it developing, but it’s a subtle and challenging thing to hover in that space — both aware of the moment yet not self-consciously thinking about it. This painting began as fluid, flowing shapes. In responding and revising it, the colors and textures assumed a voice. But within the process, perhaps because the goal was less defined—or perhaps because the flow of the process itself became the goal—the shapes slowly dissipated and the textures became the prominent element. 

At one point, I added dozens of small colored linear marks, like stitches in a quilt, woven across the surface attempting to tie it together. Perhaps this was my effort to control the discomforting vagueness, the transitional arena that was this painting. A desire to order and define a “direction by demarcation” during a period of uncertainty about where it was headed. As an artist I’ve long felt most confident as a draftsman speaking with calligraphic lines, so it’s been one of my personal challenges to discover what happens when I let go of this skill. Ultimately, in this painting, the stitchery became an underpinning, the color still sets the tone, but both were overtaken by hundreds of little notes of texture. So it is.​

And so it has me wondering: Despite the value of content and importance of organization, if the texture that we create and communicate daily in our lives, our intention and tone of voice and the presence of our being WITHIN our actions, is all that really matters in creating a harmony that we might share with others.