Artist’s Statement: 

Garden of Being

These drawings begin with an act of chance. Ink, water, and nature (leaves, flowers, seeds) are the materials used. The unpredictable start swiftly takes me away from the rational mind to a place of unexpected possibility.

Inspiration and subject matter continue to come from the natural world, my perspective is local: gardens and landscapes. Despite the “controlled nature” of these locals they retain their wild, unpredictable, and sometimes dramatic character.

Themes that persist: Life’s interconnectedness, its cycles, its sacredness and its impermanence.

Materials are many (watercolor, charcoal, ink, oil pastel, chalk pastel, graphite). Color and black and white mutually co-exist. Surprisingly, yellow, a color I normally avoid, is prominent.

Anne Scheid

2022

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Blue for the Pilgrim

In my studio is a book on traditional symbols by J.C. Cooper. In looking up the color Blue, it says: “Truth; the Intellect; revelation; wisdom; loyalty, fidelity, constancy; chastity; magnanimity; prudence; piety; peace; contemplation; and coolness.”

Blue is the color of the great deep, the feminine principle of the waters; as the sky-blue is the color of the Great Mother, Queen of Heaven and of all sky gods or sky powers….”

“It is also the Void; primordial simplicity and infinite space which being empty, can contain everything.”   

Used symbolically for millennia, blue conveys some of the most valued of human qualities like wisdom and loyalty, and our most noble aspirations. Interestingly blue is a daily presence, manifest in the vast canopy of sky overhead. Earth is called the Blue Planet because, largely covered by water and when seen from space, it appears blue. However blue, in the natural world, considering say fruits or vegetables is not so ordinary. It is not a color we touch normally. And yet, because of the sky, it is a color we experience daily. So blue in its infinite aspect is a color we use symbolically to convey characteristics of human nature we most revere, admire and seek.   

In these drawings the blue, accompanies these pilgrims, seekers of humanities’ higher aspirations, and in its full symbolic meaning, is both their context and (dharma) purpose of action.                                                                    January 2019