Description

Artist: Barbara Groh Wahlstrom

Title: Tidal Weeds

Medium: Oil on plywood

Size: 24 x 60 x 2″

Description:

TIDAL WEEDS

Crescent Beach, Maine

“When one goes to the beach in Maine, the time of day is a very important part of the experience – it is to catch some sun on the sand, swim in the shallow cold water, or hike over the rocks to escape the incoming tide, and find a suitable picnic site that will remain dry.

My walks over what was the ocean a few hours earlier, was a riot of texture and color. The golden waves of sea weeds extended as far as one could see – the sounds and textures of the weeds under foot was unexpected – it was a maze of woven sea life exposed for me, only to disappear, back to another world. The sea verged and then left me.”

Series:

BARBARA GROH ARTIST STATEMENT

November 8, 2013-January 4, 2014

COSMIC EBB AND FLOW

Lucy Lippard’s “The Lure of the Local” focuses on senses of place. She writes:

“Most often place applies to our own locale, entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life…place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.”

I chose 3 landscapes / locales to express my connection to these places in my art. What tie the locales together is their proximity to water, tides and coastal phenomena.

Sweden is the country of my residence and I am fortunate to live on the coast in south west Skane—a landscape of serene beauty, rolling hills, forests, cultivated fields, ocean, coastal storms, and lots of fog (dimma in Swedish). I have painted this fog, mist, dimma, in all it’s mystery, nurturing safety, and ethereal movements.

My feelings of connection to the softness and closeness of the mists reflect the questions and circumstances of my unexpected life in Scandinavia. As on a foggy day, I search for edges, for clarity, for the ground….for explanation. What the fog reminds me–there are no answers beyond the mist—only the truth of the moment, in it’s shapeless, groundless, flowing beauty.

Kerala, India. Kerala backwater lakes and rivers have a unique ecosystem – freshwater from the rivers meet the seawater from the Arabian Sea. The backwaters are formed by the action of the waves and shore currents creating low barrier islands (mangrove and palm) across the mouths of many of the rivers.

I spent two weeks in Kerala, painting on a small desk on the edge of a backwater river. Again, I asked questions, to the river this time. The currents moved the river past me, silently and slowly, constantly inland in one direction, and then reversing towards the sea, always in motion, always changing. This was my answer. As Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha discovered, all is revealed in the river.

Northeast coast, U.S.  Block Island and Maine are the other seascapes that inspired my work with their own tidal ecosystems. Block Island is where I found the black sand, pushed and hidden by the tides, behind and under the golden quartz sands of the beach.  The black sands are tiny iron particles, monazite, and because of the extreme weight, are easily separated from other sand. On these multicolored beaches are also colorful sea grasses, tangled and straightened—rearranged with every wave—ebb and flow. With every surge, a new drawing in line appeared in the sand, just for the moment, just for me to notice.

Maine has extraordinary tides—a drop and rise of 10 feet every 6 hours—I witnessed this change from different coastal areas, beaches and towns, and again was struck by the laws of nature and timeless, significant voices revealed in the constant movement. In the morning, I saw the ocean, and by afternoon, I saw the floor of the ocean. This is when I collected the earth/ sand/ muck that was exposed so conveniently.

With the action and feeling of ebb and flow in each scape, I was able to immerse myself in the movement, in memory, in my map of personal history, to ask my questions, and to receive the answers. These works were a gift to create, as is the nature of art, to “provoke and evoke” the deepest questions… and to reveal the simplest truths.

Barbara Groh