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Sunny S. Raschke |
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Edge Gallery and Studio |
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The Story of Trees |
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All art has a personal story behind it. I don’t paint to tell a story necessarily, but I can’t separate my life from my painting. These paintings which I’ve entitled Trees make a 12-piece series. Trees are embodiments of all the toughness, endurance, and perseverance of life in its fullness. Let me invite you to take a close look at them.
When you look at them you can walk with me along the path that my life has taken. Each painting is one chapter in that book of my life over the last fifty or so years, which I want to share with you. I do figurative, abstract, and experimental paintings that reveal a spiritual vision inside me.
With these paintings I make a statement about how I see my own struggle for that vision and to become the artist I am today. There is no beauty without struggle, no art without an effort to make that struggle visible. You may think some of these trees, from which I got the inspiration from winter scenes along the large lake in Oklahoma where I live right now, look like they are also bare and “struggling”, you are right. But there is also in some of the paintings a flowering, or spiritual transformation, of those bare trees, which tells a little of those incredible changes that have happened to me in recent years.
Let me tell you briefly about where I’ve been, because that journey is so important to understanding these paintings. I grew up in Chicago and from early childhood wanted to put my passion for color, form, and the intensity of life on canvas. I started training to be a professional artist in my early teens, but in my young adulthood and during my studies that dream was horribly shattered by the sudden and unexpected suicide of my mother. Because my family and friends were all very strict Catholics who believed suicide is a terrible sin, I lost almost all my childhood supporters and close relationships. I was lost and confused for a while, and had to abandon my dream . But I was encouraged later in life to pursue the dream once again, and I’ve been captured by the vision ever since.
Innocence is about my toddler years, the first flowering of my vision in the spring of life. Rhizome is about my reaching out in all directions as a child and teenager in pursuit of the vision. Precipice is about the tragedy of my mother’s death that I did not see coming and that, like a violent earthquake, seemed to be sending everything over the precipice into an abyss. Temptation deals with the lure of youthful pleasures, worldly desires, and my own personal “roaring twenties” resulting from my suffering and disillusionment. Consume, which reminds me of the Biblical phrase “God’s consuming fire,” portrays my memory of when, after obtaining a relatively short time so many of my material ambitions, including my own home, everything burned to ashes in a home fire.
Fog is about my disorientation after the fire, moving to Texas, starting life over, and experiencing a sense that my life was growing and moving in new directions, but the landscape was hazy. Remnant concerns losing a significant, intimate relationship at the time, again unexpectedly, and my realization that I had survived all these heartaches for a greater purpose that was only beginning to become evident. Divinity has to do with another life-changing “surprise” when I was in my thirties, when without anticipation I discovered God and an exciting new sense of spiritual direction.
Sign tells of the exultation I felt, not long after a painful divorce in my early forties and the completely improbably meeting, and falling in love with, my current professor husband. Dance relates to the giddiness of my improbable new life and the sense that I was in step with a divine destiny and calling. Supplication involves my realization ten years later that the struggle of the past to define myself was not yet over and that I was still reaching for something that seemed distant and almost impossible. Clasp is about what I realized after listening to a close friend a few days before the show, that if I reach as far as I can, my hand will be received.
I try to tell my stories as best I can through these paintings. Maybe if you appreciate any one of them, you walk that road with me. Sunny Raschke
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