Northern Lights

Again by accident - through greeting cards - I have discovered an artist worth watching: Monte Dolack. Finding the elk with the candles made me step back: and oddly, it made me think of the (very) dark forests behind my parents' little country home when I was a child. I remembered how when the wind rushed through the trees it sounded like the world was being torn up by the roots and taken away, and I remembered the dead quiet in the hours before morning, with neither electric lights nor any hum and adrenaline of cars, heaters, air conditioners, PCs - only the silence and the beautiful violence of winter stars against the sky broken only by the occasional rustle of the attic or creak of the old house's timber. I kept myself wrapped tightly in afghans my mother made, and kept the windows a crack open during the cold February so that I could listen for when the goats would begin birthing out in the pasture. I don't know why the elk with the candles brought that back in a rush, but they did: at any rate I think it is the most beautiful painting I have seen this week, and the fact that I saw it on a greeting card (until recently, looking for greeting cards was always a haste and a hassle) is still a wonder to me. I will keep exploring to see in what unexpected venues one might find fantastical and revitalizing images, or a source of myth.