The Shifting Cultural Life of Our Time — Terrill Welch by herself - issue #58
Afternoon sun drapes the valley in warmth that is pushed back by the deep cool of late fall shade where I crouch beneath the fir trees in our yard planting spring bulbs. Forty King Alfred daffodils, forty mixed snow crocuses. Then, eighteen tulips including Spryng Sunrise, Disneyland Paris and Suncatcher. There is so much promise tucked into these holes in the ground with a bit of bonemeal added for good measure! I take a photograph so I can remember what is growing where. If it works, I will plant more next fall and then the fall after that.
This garden bed only gets enough sun to grow things during spring and fall when the light is low. Summer finds it shaded, dry and mostly dormant. I have grown bulbs here in the past and a splash their colour here and there still brightens the spring air. But this is a concerted effort, more planned and deliberate. Though not a painting, it has the same feel to it with a longer timeline to see if my vision will work. Patience is required as I wait out the short Canadian southwest coast winter months and watch for the first spears to appear in late February or early March. Now there is time to turn again to what is on my easel.
I will likely have finished this painting and be ready to show it to you next Friday. But like the spring bulbs, you will have to wait.
Other than this, it has been a quiet and reflective week. Without hesitation, I have settled into this breadth of stillness while still having one ear turned towards a tragedy in Alberta where a fire took the lives of four soldiers and injured 39 others, 19 who are critical at the time of writing this. There has been a referendum in the province of Alberta as well that overwhelmingly voted against the option of holding a second vote on whether to secede from Canada. Tomorrow, is our provincial election in British Columbia. We are all well aware of global events and tensions. Even with all of this, it is hard to move beyond the pleasant arrangement of colour from the last of the nasturtiums curling down to the squirrel’s half-eaten wild mushrooms.
WHAT I AM READING
I am half-heartedly making my way through a small book NextGen Collectors and the Art Market by Georgina Adam (2026) that feels a bit like it might have passed its best before date before it was even published. Adam admits to being a boomer who researched and interviewed those born between 1965 and 2012 which are practically clumped into Gen X (1965-80), millennials (1981-80) and Gen Z (1997-2012). In more immediate life reference terms, I have a son, daughter and three grandsons in each of these generational markers. These individuals do not come from art collecting heritage even though they have original art in their homes, which is often the case when one has artists in their family. Still, I shall read the book to the end even if I question the value of Instagram (and other social media) to either younger art collectors or the art market. My personal sense is that this research is past its prime and particularly Gen Z do not trust what social media delivers. As of yet in my reading, the disruption of Artificial Intelligence to not just the creative process but also to the internet itself, is not given full consideration in regards to its future impact. However, this book is a place to begin to discern the shifting cultural life of our time. Once I have completed the book, I will let you know more, if there is anything worth taking into consideration.
A lighter workload often brings me to poetry and poems that are old favourites. There is a haiku poem by a United States poet, Diane di Prima, about creativity and imagination…
the inner tide —
What moon does it follow?
I wait for a poem
This is in Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart by Patricia Donegan (2008, p.149). Donegan goes on to write in relation to this poem:
To protect and revere the imagination, we need to step beyond hope and fear and enter unknown territory. In Tibetan Buddhism this unknown is a bardo, or gap, the word often used for the place between death and rebirth — yet it is also a place of in-between states of our so-called awake life: a place of pregnant uncertainty and opening into creative space (pp.149-150).
This is the place I find myself with the completion of my MA Fine Art degree, world tensions, individual uncertainty in my the trajectory of the pace in my caregiving responsibilities and my own maturing in what is less time ahead of me than behind me. I continue to paint with a loose theme of “Close to home” but it is a physical geographical reference more than a creative or emotional container for my current work. I keep thinking that it feels more like “Close to me” rather than “Close to home”.
I turn the worn pages of New and Selected Poems: Volume One by United States poet Mary Oliver (1992). The lines I am seeking are broken open against the spine revealing yellowed pages:
Doesn’t everything die at last, too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
(From “The Summer Day”, p. 94)
I turn the pages to the next well worn crease, this time marked with a sticky note:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
And then at the end of the poem, a reminder…
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
(From “Wild Geese” p.110)
My latest arbutus tree painting with its already mostly hidden figures is about stepping into the unknown. I am holding the tension in my personal pause not because I am good, not because I have worked for it but simply because this time is being offered to my imagination. I am waiting for an opening, not in exhaustion but with the slow, often imperceptible, movement of a slack tide shifting directions within the same sea on the same island of experience laced with possibility. I am holding this space for as long as it takes. It could be days, weeks, months and possibly even years. However, in the past, this particular kind of pause has not extended to years. Still, it can’t be rushed or brushed over. The only way forward is through consideration and astute observation while showing up each day to the studio and doing the work — because, as a maker of paintings, waiting for my imagination to provide a new direction is accomplished by painting.
FEATURE PAINTINGS
I chose two paintings to feature with this issue as I feel they continue my conversation within this specific issue. Both of these available paintings will be familiar to many of you because the first was completed in 2023 and the second in 2021. You will find more information about each in my online gallery link provided at the very end of this publication.
“Windswept Garry Oaks at East Point” by Terrill Welch, oil on gessobord
14 x 11 x 0.2 in (35.56 x 27.94 x 0.51 cm)
Artist notes: Storms are frequent but the southeasterly winds are unrelenting at East Point on Saturna Island. A grove of Garry Oaks lean into the shelter available from the cliffs behind them. Nature tolerates neither heroes nor fools. Trees know. If trees do not bend to the elements and take advantage of supports on offer, they will break.
“The Thief Left it Behind” by Terrill Welch, oil on linen board, 14 x 11 x 0.2 in (35.56 x 27.94 x 0.51 cm)
Artist notes: The title of the painting comes from one of my favourite poems which has an equally favourite story to go with it.
The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.
By Ryōkan Taigu (1758 - 1831)
The Japanese Sōtō Zen Master composed this poem after a thief had come to his simple hut in the forest and stolen his few belongings. Ryōkan discovered that the thief had forgotten to take his meditation cushion and so he ran after the thief to give this to him as well. Any sort of theft of the very few possessions of the monk were amusing to him because the only thing he felt he had of real value was the moon (metaphorically representing enlightened wisdom) which could not be stolen.
UNTIL NEXT TIME
I trust we shall all find our way forward into whatever is next with clear-eyed determination. A considered life. This is the case for most of you reading and sharing this space with me. In fact, I count on this aspect when I am painting and writing. We are a collection of thoughtful and reflective individuals by nature. I treasure this more than you will likely ever know. There is creative fuel within these connections that comes through in my imagining as much as through your responses. So shall ask, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild precious life” today, tomorrow and beyond?
All the best as always,
Terrill 👩🎨❤️🎨
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