HEALERS AND WHOLENESS Paintings at Toby’s Art Gallery, February 2022
Revisiting Mary Oliver’s question at the end of her poem The Summer Day
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I respond by offering healers whose intention is to help our planet and ourselves become whole, as well as to generate experiences beyond language where healings happen.
As healers, we come in many manifestations, ushering in healing states of different perspectives and offerings. A healer, known sometimes as shaman, homeopath, hair cutter, dog trainer, fire fighter, bus driver, child, and lover, might suggest a distinct remedy as a cure for a physical issue. But more fundamentally, the healer offers a connection to presence, to feeling whole in spirit. When that occurs, playfulness and joy are born.
I paint with the earth itself, incorporating sand, ashes and thickened paint into the surfaces of paintings. Working with the earth’s gravitational field, I tilt the canvas in multiple directions to guide the water-thinned paint down stream. My purpose in this improvisational process of paint dancing is to reveal an active essential state such as welcoming, floating, opening, turning that is conducive to presence, to wholeness.
BEYOND
Paintings at Avenue 25 Gallery in San Mateo
February 22 - April 3, 2020
The Earth is the source of these paintings. Stemming from my meditation practice which includes lying on the ground to connect directly with the earth, I sense into the geological moments of upheaval, erosion and equilibrium caused by the elemental energies of earth, air, fire and water.
The painting is an improvisation with paint and an invitation to the dynamic energies beyond myself to appear. What I bring to the extemporization is openness and a willingness to encourage what arises.
I begin by pouring latex enamel onto the stretched canvas. I spritzer the paint with water and prop the canvas up, adjusting the frame like a sailor trimming the sails. The color slides downhill. Sometimes the paint forms giant alluvial fans, other times, I spray enough water onto the paint that its binding medium washes away leaving pixels of pigment on the canvas’ surface. Excess fluids slide over the edges. I ride with the paint as it pours, floods, heaves, bends, cracks, warps and wrinkles its way downward in the grip of gravity, creating an earthscape made of the paint itself.
Together, paint, earth and I, we stream into the unknown and into the power of what lies beyond.
Toni Littlejohn,
February 2020
TERRA FIRMA / TERRA FORMANDO
An Exhibition of Paintings, June 11-July 22, 2019
The San Francisco Bay Model Visitor Center
2100 Bridgeway, Sausalito CA 94965
Using an evolution of multiple layers of latex enamel paint, Toni Littlejohn metaphorically depicts in large scale a vibrant series of earth histories, both as utopian vision and dystopian inevitability. Elegant, vaporous horizons of primordial light inform land spaces that are more liquid than solid, beautifully dense with pastoral temptation yet inexorably fused with a caveat about what is to come. Transcendent idealities of color and form merge with the realities of the Anthropocene, as eternal Nature is confronted by the priorities and impositions of a human-made world.
These are large, fearless works, and they also suggest a rich contemplation of diverse oppositions: of place and idea, the real and the possible, the actual and the supposed. In a sense they depict the discrete, unattainable places of memory, places to be discovered in dreams, spoken through myth, and visually interpreted through the visceral abstract forms that are compellingly painted into Littlejohn's luminous fabric of the imaginary.
Charles Anselmo, Curator Avenue 25 Gallery, San Mateo
June 2019