The Wind is Storming Up the Bluffs

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

36x30"

The Wind is Storming up the Bluffs is my visual interpretation of a poem - see at the end of this description.
This assemblage contains 20 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. For this piece the strips were cut to a length so that they were surrounded by an area of white and I offset the strips to heighten the energy in the painting.

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.