from sadness to plenitude

"I looked down no. 1" 36" x 24" oil on canvas. 2012

In 1971, Pablo Neruda spoke to the Paris Review: "My poetry has passed through the same stages as my life; from a solitary childhood and an adolescence cornered in distant, isolated countries, I set out to make myself a part of the great human multitude. My life matured, and that is all. It was in the style of the last century for poets to be tormented melancholiacs. But there can be poets who know life, who know its problems, and who survive by crossing through the currents. And who pass through sadness to plenitude."

I would like my art to engage the challenges of life and to cross through its currents, but I think this must happen naturally and in stages, the way our lives grow and mature.