Terrill Welch by herself - issue #27 Gratitude During Strange Times
If you are feeling as if our human condition and the institutions we rely on are being tossed like pebbles in a tidal surge, you are not alone. I feel this way as well. The dizzying disorientation of these rapid morally and ethically depleted changes by the current U.S. administration are and will impact global stability and are not something to be taken lightly. At the same time, I find it important to keep my balance and equilibrium even when it is extremely difficult to do so. With this in mind, I can reassure you that, for the most part, this post is a sanctuary from outside turmoil and offers an escape from the political, economic and environmental challenges that we are all facing to various degrees. I am going to present to you the newest released paintings. Many of these paintings have been created with an intention inner peace, well being and resilience. They feel just right for this moment. I trust that their intended reflectiveness is evident. I will share with you a painting that has sold and is now safely in its new home in another country. I will also offer a detailed reflection on the process for one of my latest paintings and more. My hope is that this issue even more than most will assist us in finding strength and determination to address and resolve challenges in other aspects of our lives.
NEW RELEASES
I have released six new paintings since the beginning of 2025. One was mostly completed by the end of December but it still counts because the completion date is January 2, 2025. One of the six paintings is also sold and will be shared in the SOLD section of the newsletter. This leaves us with five new paintings for your consideration with a reminder that there is currently a 25% CHOOSE CANADA savings in place and shipping to the United States is restricted likely the middle of March. So let’s have a look these brand new artworks! I also have a special public offer for April or May when I finish my first school unit but it won’t be quite as generous as this one. So, if you can and you see something you wish to add to your art collection, now is a better time.
I am going to feature each work in a digital room view with an imagined floating frame and then provide the online gallery direct link for each painting with more images and details below. Enjoy!
I also want to share that these two paintings can be considered a pair and possibly presented something like this…
I hope you enjoyed this focused attention on the beauty and rhythms of the sea floor along with my long story of land and sea at the beginning.
WHAT HAS SOLD
On Tuesday, January 21, 2025, I followed through on a commitment I had made to go closer in my sea floor landscape series. I had several reference options and decided on mussels as my subject. I gathered together a few images from my observations, some from as recent as this week. There are hours and hours of pleasurable meanderings and sitting and observing behind this selection that spans a period over the last ten months.
In the end, I decided to pull from this image from the beginning of June as a primary source of inspiration. It is the outside reef along the Strait of Georgia in the Salish Sea at Reef Bay.
I can still feel the sun on my back and the sound of the rhythmic wash of the sea over the mussels that brushes the salty air towards me as I crouch low to the barnacle-covered sandstone.
I decide on a close intimate view and begin to shape it onto a 12 x 10 inch acrylic red ground.
The darks must go in first on this one. Even then, it will be a challenge to hold them to the end and round the forms while still keeping the life of the work.
The painting is blocked in swiftly on the small canvas.
I settle in painting while moving the easel around the studio, up onto the kitchen area and then around that room several times to stay out of the direct bright low midday winter sunlight. It didn’t seem to matter much. I used the adjustments as visual breaks and kept painting. The whole process from beginning to end took only a couple of hours.
I separate out and frame the still shiny and wet painting to share to my social media followers along with my artist notes, as is my usual practice.
A significant U.S. art collector of my small paintings inquires and then purchases the painting the next morning. This is her comment that I share with her permission:
I really fell in love with this one. Even without reading your description, I understood the painting immediately. Somehow I connect into your spirit so easily and I am thankful for such a gift.
There is no greater honour than having the stewardship of one of my paintings be taken up by an art collector. However, the best and most significant piece of this feedback is knowing that my intention for the work reached through to the viewer.
Here is the painting below another “Terrill Welch Painting” in its new home..
Next, there are a couple of art making process sections with videos that were first posted in my art journal and I thought you might enjoy them...
SEASHELLS AFTERNOON PAINTING PROCESS
My days are full to overflowing with painting, reading, class and peer discussions, and absorbing my first tutor feedback suggestions to further develop my painting project about the sea floor. These threads remain entangled as I keep theory, research and my painting practice woven tightly together.
The American philosopher Anthony Rudd in his book Painting Presence: Why Paintings Matter expands on the work of Russian philosopher and theologian Paul Evdokimov and adds an additional fourth element to the three already defined by Evdokimov.
In summary, Rudd concludes that every painting has the following four elements:
- The artist as the maker of the painting,
- the work itself as a physical object,
- the viewer as the person who looks at the painting, and
- the subject matter made present in its essential nature. (2022, pp. 226-229)
Rudd’s fourth element is where I want to further expand or break open my investigation of the sea floor. The question is - how do I do this?
The tutorial feedback suggests taking more in-progress images so as to better reflect on what is happening during the creation of a painting. This is offered primarily as a way of stepping back. I am guessing this is not in the physical sense of stepping back because I already have a well developed muscle memory practice of rhythmically stepping back in my actual standing painting process. I am taking this suggestion to step back to mean more of an interrogation of my painting decisions, as a way of finding other points of departure or consideration. Since this is nearly impossible, at least for me, to do while actually painting, my idea is to capture the process more thoroughly while it is happening and then step back to see if I can find new points of entry into my practice.
This takes unflinching, clear-eyed bravery which brings me to France and a letter dated Monday, June 24, 1906 by Rainer Maria Rilke to his wife Clara where he writes “After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.” (2002, p.11)
My colleague, painter, linguist and writer, Dr. Elena Maslova-Levin, used this quote to anchor my work in her introduction to our shared exhibition catalogue Conversations on Edge published in 2018. Not surprisingly, this prospect of going “all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further” remains a guiding proposition in my practice. (Maslova-Levin and Welch, 2018)
This may appear as if I have moved away from the theoretical influences presented in the western philosophy of Plato and the eastern philosophy of Dōgen about painting and art. However, the opposite is more accurate. I will come back to this again later on.
For now, I have a 22 minute video that details the development of my latest painting on a 30 x 24 inch canvas using walnut oil paint called “Seashells Afternoon”.
Note: The room view in the video is created using a digital tool called Canvy and it can be found at Canvy.com. The digital tool was created specifically for this room view of artwork purpose.
In reviewing my painting practice and creative process, I would like to further emphasize the aspect of painting as a translation of a conversation between my subject and myself that is then available to the viewer. However, the primary engagement is between me and the subject. My first point of reference is the specific nature of my focus. In general, our natural environment is my longest, most enduring and consistent relationship. This is the relationship that I have the most familiarity and trust. All else in my painting practice is value-added and welcomed but also less critical to my process. What this means in practical terms is that art theory and research are additions to my established painting practice. Therefore, theory and research are currently in service to my painting and must find their way around and within my discernment of the sea floor and moving brushes across a surface. I am not so sure how useful this orientation is to my finding other points of departure or consideration in my painting practice However, it where I am at the moment. To further impact my chosen theoretical approach and painting practice I am going to do a small series of painting study sketches in acrylic as a way of slowing the painting process down to moments of full stop and easy ability to paint over with limited drying time. This should provide me with more critical assessment information of my painting practice than I have now and a stronger overt connection to theoretical considerations.
Here is the painting again while it is still on the easel.
Reference list:
Canvy (2025). Canvy. [online] Canvy. Available at: https://canvy.com [Accessed 11 Feb. 2025].
Maslova-Levin, E. and Welch, T. (2018). Conversations on Edge . [online] Abebooks.com. Available at: https://www.abebooks.com/9781986742214/Conversations-Edge-Maslova-Levin-Elena-Welch-1986742210/plp [Accessed 9 Feb. 2025].
Rudd, A. (2022). Painting and Presence: Why Paintings Matter. [online] Oxford University Press eBooks. Oxford University Press. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192856289.001.0001.
Welch, T. (2025). Seashells Afternoon Painting Process by Terrill Welch. [online] Youtu.be. Available at: https://youtu.be/ai_yr3lgyKk?si=h9IlQoQj6d0csmb5 [Accessed 11 Feb. 2025].
JUST FOR FUN - A LINE DRAWING EXERCISE
I did this line drawing exercise for school but it is something that almost any of us could have some fun playing around with so I thought I would share it with you.
I temporarily borrowed a few seashells from Reef Bay for this exercise to introduce an element of chance to studying seashells using line drawing. This exercise is an adaptation of an exercise offered by John Daido Loori in The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life called “Practice: Experiencing Without Identifying”. (Loori, 2005, pp.80-81) My intention is to place more emphasis on using my capacity of touch to determine shape and size by placing the shells out of view in a cloth bag and then reaching in with my right hand to choose one to draw while drawing with my dominant left hand. What I found most interesting was that more elements of chance were introduced than I had anticipated. Some of the pencils I had set out didn’t work very well. Sometimes I couldn’t find the shells in the cloth bag and I had to resist the urge to look and you can see me starting to lift open the cloth bag and put it down again several times when I was trying to find the shells. However, I did get to know the shells better even in this short exercise.
What I Discovered: My takeaway is that it might be interesting to do this again without recording and setting time constraints. I could try a variation by using a combination of visually hidden touch study like in this exercise and combine it with visual observation time drawing that is repeated in a rhythmic pattern like the sea exposing and covering the shells. I could maybe do it by opening and closing my hand that is holding the shell. It might be interesting to do this with one of my video recordings observations offering the sounds of the sea at the same time or by drawing by the sea once it gets warmer. The idea is not to trick myself but to strengthen my relationship with touch as a source of sensory information in my painting practice. These are ideas for future exercises. For now, this video records what happened during this first line drawing practice exercise.
As I mention in the video, this could be done with any smaller objects. I chose the seashells because it is central to my project. I do not remove shells from the beach lightly because they are of significant importance to the health and wellbeing of the sea floor. For this reason, I will return them to where I found them now that I have finished the drawing exercise and will do the same if I do any further drawing exercises in the same manner.
Reference:
Loori, John Daido (2005). The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life. New York: Ballantine Books.
WHAT I AM READING
Besides the references listed in the section above, there is one other topic I have been fascinated with and that is the impact of the attention economy. This topic came to my attention as part of a news clip on MSNBC with the author and MSNBC host Chris Hayes. The title of the book is The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource and I have just purchased the kindle version.
Hayes basically takes us through how we have come to find ourselves repeatedly facing the sirens grabbing for our attention:
Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future. (Part of the Amazon Book blurb)
If you would like to sample some of the content covered in the book, I suggest listening to (or reading the transcript) of Hayes’ interview with David Roberts at:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/chris-hayes-on-the-attention-economy
The podcast interview is in millennial speak (the book itself is formally written and referenced). But if you can stick with it and get past the frequent non-sentences, you will be rewarded with an accessible discussion about the issues and framework where humans have moved from an agrarian society to an industrial economy and then an informational economy to what we have now in an attention economy. In addition, Hayes and Roberts outline the labour and economic structures related to these changes and finally explore the beginnings of solutions. The interview is enough to make me consider leaving social media because I neither do I like nor do I do well when trying to communicate in a shouting, grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, slot machine like, dopamine inducing, attention seeking manner - no matter how much easier it is than grabbing and holding someone’s attention. I have often felt that my social media posts were used as bait for advertising but now I am sure of it. We can point out the impact of algorithms but it is more than this when there is a society addicted to doom scrolling through dopamine inducing grab designed and promoted online consumption.
As an artist, curator, writer and a member of the public I believe we have off ramps to this emphasis on attention economy but they are likely to take more than our individual will to make a difference. Addictions of any kind are challenging. I have some thoughts about what I can personally do such as my newsletter as a writer, in-person gallery space as a gallery owner and curator and open studio time in my art studio for in-person engagement as an artist. The other options include finding ways to engage in deeper conversations online, such as we are having in our dialogue here.
What are your thoughts about how we might create and develop engaging and meaningful exchanges between artists, curators, writers and the public in a mutually beneficial and empowered way?
UNTIL NEXT TIME
The only certainty we can truly count on at anytime is uncertainty. Once we can accept this, then we can notice and appreciate many more of the brief moments of treasured bless. This past few months have been both challenging and rewarding. I am grateful for the many notes, comments on newsletter posts, long email letters and thoughtful physical letters arriving in the mail with gift cards to the local bakery and of course the many text messages from art collectors and serious fans of my work friends. There has also been, without a request any kind, significant balances received early on artworks purchased on payment plans. This is something that most small businesses appreciate and my art business is no exception. This, combined with the recent sales, means that all of the tuition, right through to the end of July 2026, for my MA in Fine Art is tucked away in savings! I am ever-so-grateful to be in this position during this particular period of uncertainty when painting sales are understandably likely to be slower and even more carefully considered than usual.
So my deepest gratitude and heartfelt thanks for your ongoing patronage and support and also your friendship. No words are really enough to express the difference you make in my ability to keep going, keep gathering references, keep painting, keep going to school and keep taking care of both David and I every day. Thank you for being you and all that you do. Even the smallest things we do are much bigger than we sometimes think. With this in mind, I hope that the “Terrill Welch by herself” offers something of lasting value in return for you time and attention and thoughtful engagement.
With the warmest regards,
Terrill 👩🎨🎨❤️
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