The Wind is Everything

Charcoal, pencils, acrylic, and inks on canvas mounted on wood panel.

36x18"

The Wind is Everything is my visual interpretation of a poem - see at the end of this description.
This assemblage contains 29 strips of varying widths from 5 different mixed media paintings that were painted on canvas. The strips are mounted on gallery depth birch wood panels using acrylic medium and finished with artist grade satin varnish.

Woman Walking with Dogs 
by Linda Goulais

the grey morn of another day
in a warmly lit tea room
on a rough English coast. 
Outside in the bleak,
past the tea cups
and the smeared glass,
a woman is walking
along the edge under a dark sky
grey dogs all around her.

The wind is storming up the bluffs
from the sea, 
a low whelping howl, 
and the wind is everything.  
She leans into it
says a prayer perhaps.
Her hair is wild
tentacled, salt-flaked, alive.
She is, in the sea-smudged light,
both improbable and astonishing.

The dogs, all legs and flattened fur
circle close, move off
circle close again
protecting her, or at least
re-affirming each other —
the huddled mass
in the unforgiving wind 
drifting slowly down the bluff 
to the point.