Firmament #2., Wendy Ide Williams, Acrylic on Canvas, 2022
Editors note: Wendy Williams serves as an acolyte at The Cathedral of All Saints and offers much encouragement to me in my role as missioner and director of Cathedral Arts. She and Allen Grindle have a show opening this Saturday at the Laffer Gallery in Schuylerville. Wendy has given me permission to share her recent art and artist’s statement below. (I cannot help but comment on how very difficult I find writing an artist’s statement to be—I love how Wendy tackles the task here.) You can read my post with Wendy’s work from 2021 at: https://www.cathedralofallsaints.org/cathedral-arts-blog/sacred-seeing.
I will be leading an hour with art on Zoom on June 27 at 7:30PM: Making Understanding: Art as Theological Statement, and I welcome you to sign up HERE.
Incipio Coeli After John, Wendy Williams
“The universes that are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.”
—The Cloud of Unknowing, anonymous work of Christian mysticism, late 14th century
My discourse with the painting process takes place in the middle of this theatre of thought and then action. The science of nature, the sense that is formed by understanding and knowing the why of an image or fact seems to fuel the position of complete loss and lost and found. Rooted in biology and botany, nature and gesture as well as conscious and unconscious perception, the baseline for start and finish in the visual dialogue of making a picture lies well beyond my ability to rationalize form and structure. Form and structure are not given by knowing but by exploring the realm of the infinite and finite meeting. Words express this conundrum more explicitly, as in a title if I am so lucky to have landed on one -The wedding of language and image and all that lies between. There is a constant dialectical shift between a graphic representation of energy and form with something unspoken, unseen, sometimes wonderful and sometimes dark and hard.
— Wendy Williams
For directions and gallery hours: https://thelaffergallery.com/