The title is from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I began the series with the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve north of Strong City, Kansas, in mind. But that has led me to a more expansive meditation on grass, which, at first glance, appears so simple but (as Whitman was aware) is anything but. As I continue to create pieces for this series, I find myself looking at the "leaves" but also at the vast living system that is the prairie, focusing on lines moving in response to a variety of factors (wind speed, wind direction, season, time of day, water and its absence) that function as chance operations and on color fields that overlap and blend (with each other and with the lines) in fascinating ways. The spectrum of little blue stem, for example, ranges from greens and blues through yellows and ochres and rusts and reds and browns and tufts of white. On the National Park Service website, the preserve is described as "the last stand of the tallgrass prairie." A remnant, perhaps, but I like to think of it as a living resistance, still standing – and that is what I celebrate in these works.
watercolor and acrylic on birch panel
