My friend commissioned these pieces as a gift for her husband; the text was excerpted from Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Country of Marriage“. Though I’ve been putting meditative text drawings and abstract/non-representational pieces next to each other for a couple of years now, this is the first time I’ve created a pair specifically to fit together rather than combining them after the fact. A small opportunity to practice conversation between these two ways of working.

III.
Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

–Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage