Reflections on Nature

Dear Reader,

Last month rounded out 18 years of writing monthly blogs. It’s become a habit to pause and reflect on what the life of an artist and writer has come to mean. Judy’s Journal became the autobiography of a person determined to situate herself inside the creative process and report from the field. Stories of making paintings, books, poems, essays, examining rituals and sources of inspiration, grief, happiness – it’s all here.

I returned to painting in 1998, but I did not plan to have a website. I met Patsy McCowan when I joined the Women’s Caucus for Art, and that changed everything. Since September 2004, she and her technological and design skills have shown me the advantages of keeping an updated Internet presence. Thank you, Patsy!

This month, my focus came from looking at 18 years of Judy’s Journal and searching for common threads. One theme emerged immediately: Nature at work in my own backyard in Worcester, Massachusetts and how I have reacted to Her presence and occasional bad moods by creating art. I invite you to visit the index and read these blogs:

2009-June; 2017-June; 2020- June Three blogs were inspired by an ice storm and several years later, a windstorm that tore through our backyard. From the first sounds, like gunfire as branches snapped under the weight of the ice, to house-shaking thuds, to chain saws, to a decision to paint dozens of stumps, to Nature bidding Her time during the inevitable and quiet aging process.

2011 July What to do when a fig tree stops giving figs, then dies, leaving a delicate sculpture that begged to be painted.

2020 April What happens when you look out a window and see something curiously unidentifiable and need to investigate.

2019 June; 2021 November Several blogs express my grief over my sister, Jennie’s, death in March 2016, but these two relate the story of a poem by W.S. Merwin and how it ended up on a rock in her memorial garden.

While writing Judy’s Journal returned me to Spain, Italy or Great Britain, just as powerful and perhaps more meaningful were the times Nature put me in my own backyard, pen in hand.