Mostly Looking

I didn't bring the sketchbook this time. I brought a journal––lined pages––and have been recording what I see with words instead of marks.

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The lushness I'm used to is botanical. The Lowcountry is green in a way that's almost aggressive — marsh grass, live oaks, things growing over everything they touch. I've spent years painting that kind of abundance. So I landed in Greece expecting something I recognized, and got something else entirely.

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Greece is dry. Scrub brush, stone, an arid landscape that doesn't have much to say to a painter who thinks of lushness as green. But it's lush in every other register. The blue––the sea, the sky, the way they run into each other — is a kind of abundance I wasn't prepared for. The food. The way people live there, unhurried and generous, with a fullness that doesn't seem to cost them anything.

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I've been writing about this in the journal. Not descriptions of places so much as trying to figure out what lushness actually is, since apparently I've been defining it too narrowly. It runs through my life in a way I'm only starting to see clearly — Singapore, years ago. Morocco. The Lowcountry marsh. Greece, which has almost nothing in common with any of those places and somehow belongs in the same thread.

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I don't know yet where this lands in the work. That's the honest answer.

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Back in the Lowcountry now. Demolition on the new studio hasn't started yet — it's a year or more out. In the rental for now, which is fine. The easel is out. The journal's still on the table.

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Back next week with whatever wouldn't leave me alone this week.

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— Shelby