Artist's Statement BRITT BLOCK
Anton Chekov is reported to have said: “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light
on broken glass.” As modern people, we are chards of glass. We are separate and broken. But
that is not all that we are. We get glimpses of wholeness, of the light in the world; we
see that our brokenness is not everything we are.
I use the language of nature: rocks, water, leaves, fruit blossoms as they capture
fragments of light. Rocks, water, leaves, apple blossoms: they arrive in multiples,
seemingly the same. I choose the most ordinary - the most "unimportant". Those
simple moments can provide a portal that transports us out of the mundane and into the
radiant ground of being and the underlying aliveness: the tissue that connects us. The
underpaintings for all of my works are fluorescent, neon colors which sometimes peek
through- giving us a glimpse of the radiant light within the world. If we are lucky, we
can catch a side-eye glimpse of this wonder, this radiance, this love, as we travel
through our lives.
I am interested in my work as evidence that we are not fragments, we are bees. We
neglect this about ourselves and it is our deepest truth. We are a hive. We are our
connections. As modern people, we are habituated to attending to the broken, the
negative, the heroic, the performative masculine of becoming an ego. Our true work
rests deeply in the feminine principals of attraction; of repetitive, ordinary work
producing the nectar or our lives; that our ordinary lives are composed of a hundred
million moments of ordinary love and gentle goodwill that go unsung and invisible
unless we attend to them specifically. In the natural order, work and industry move
through gentle basic trust producing the honey of our lives: gratitude. Thus are our lives
made rich.
By bringing this understanding to the foreground, my hope is to help with the knowledge
that the barriers that divide us are false and performative. We are not individual bees - we
are the hive. We are so much more than we know. We are our kindness. We are
beauty. Our power and our truth is in our network; in the hive. When we are kind to one
another, we make honey. Our lives overflow with gratitude.
In the end, the paintings are about presence. They are about the radiant and healing transcendent beauty of the earth, about Nature’s redemptive power, about the glimpse into the eternal that we get abiding with the land. And they are for me also about showing up inside my experience day after day, saying yes to everything, being present with all of it, true to all of it, witnessing the river flowing through me and witnessing myself as the river, and the flow of change.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man." -- Heraclitus
