[Updated 12 March 2020]
(Elizabeth Mayor is one of the artists at
Two Rivers Printmaking Studio
85 North Main Street, Suite 160
White River Junction, VT 05001 USA.)
Up to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center again this morning, for a follow-up to a series of tests and nuclear medicine imaging scans (good news, nothing worrisome at this point: “watchful waiting” for now), I finally remembered on this fourth visit to photograph some striking prints I’d spotted on the walls of one corridor and seek out more info on the artist.
The med center is about as comforting as a hospital can manage to be, with soft colors, open bright spaces, plants, paintings and photographs. You can visit here for a good sample of the art on display.
These two images are part of a series of five animals by Lebanon, NH artist Elizabeth Mayor, and labelled “gift of the artist” to the hospital.
I love their energy and lines. They have a kind of shamanic vision quality to them. Fox and owl are my favorites of the five. I’ve emailed a contact person on the med center website for more info on the artist, and will post it here if/when I hear back.
These feel like spirit guides for the dark half of the year.
Two nights ago my wife and I were awakened by coyotes yipping outside our front door. I’d left some spoiled food outside the door, intending to dump it on our midden out back, and forgetting about it altogether in the middle of dishes and writing and stoking the fire and bringing up the laundry to the drying racks — the usual tasks of winter.
The coyotes’ midnight song reminded me.
Here are images for dream-work and meditation. They may not resonate for you like they do for me. I present them as examples of finding art (and supporting artists whose vision moves you) and feeding your imaginal and imagining self. As the intermediary between realms, imagination asks for our loving attention, and I continually try to make space for it and for the imaging-working self, which seeks out representations, doodles them, paints and draws and photographs them if we give it a chance and the materials, carries the images into dreams, and works with them in ways words cannot accomplish.
Praise to the Nameless that looks out through my eyes with me, through all our eyes at the other eyes looking back!
As St. Francis remarked, What we are looking for is what is looking.
I continually try and often forget, till an image grabs me and nourishes a hunger I’d forgotten to attend to, and then I’m off again, the imaging self making and playing with pictures, a language older than words.
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Photos of prints by Elizabeth Mayor, Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Dated article on Mayor here.
A Druid Way 