Tuesday, 13 October 2026

Excerpts from Terrill Welch MA Fine Art Journal

This post combines three separate original entries into this one post. I rarely use digital painting tools but they came in handy when I had to be away from my art studio for an unknown amount of time.

Exploring the Work of Artist Joan Jonas: ‘We come from the sea’ 

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

Yesterday, I was going on my daily 4 km circuit walk around our neighbourhood crescent that we have imagined for ourselves as a practical, low maintenance and enjoyable treadmill. Sometimes, I just walk up the hill on Bowsprite Crescent, along Wood Dale Drive down the other side of Bowsprite Crescent and back to where I started and then around again, six times. Other times while I walk, I listen to music or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) national public radio. 

On Monday, 18 November 2024, I decided to listen to CBC Radio One live with Nahlah Ayed and ‘Ideas in the Afternoon’. Ayed was presenting an interview by Mary Lynk with American artist Joan Jonas that was first published on CBC 22 October 2024. The interview had been done in July of this year and Joan Jonas is vibrant, engaging and 88 years old. I was still listening when I had finished my walk. When I came back into the house, I quickly wrote down the information to be able to find the podcast later.  

Today, I listened to the interview again. What has deeply intrigued me is Jonas’ remarks about the our human relationship to the sea:

‘We come from the sea. We don’t think about it very often, but our semicircular canals are similar to those of the fish. Our eyes are similar. We have backbones and the fish grew little legs and came out of the sea and then developed into what we are today,’ she explained (Lynk, 2024).

‘There are different theories about how that happened. My idea is that we have a memory of that somewhere in our unconscious. We remember that we come from the sea. It’s not a memory. It’s a feeling. It’s in our DNA. I think that’s where all these stories come from and our desire to go back to the sea, our desire to swim underwater’(Lynk, 2024).

However, it is most powerful to hear Jonas read her words at 6:30 on the 53:59 podcast. There is power and conviction in her voice as if she is lifting her words up over the sounds of waves. 

I find myself searching further into Jonas’ work in video and performance art. Her works are like having a conversation in the language of my inner most private self. Jonas uses memory, imagining, dream, her voice, her body and video together and exquisitely mapped out in layers within physical space using mirrors, installations, collaborations with musicians, performers, herself and the act of drawing or painting. These aspects are all present at once in a fractured whole of space and time which includes a viewer, possibly any viewer or at least no perfectly contextualised viewer. 

There is something important for me here. I have yet to grasp what exactly. I know it might have to do with my observation and reference gathering practice. I am fascinated by how Jonas makes her process visible and part of what she presents in conversation with herself and others. There are fragments of continuation in her multimedia pieces that paint alone on a surface has difficulty communicating by itself. Has Jonas offered a way to see the length of my art practice as my art rather than just what is left behind with my body and mind on a painted surface? I am not sure but I want to ponder the possibility. 

I place this note here in my journal so it can be mused upon during the weeks, months and years ahead.

References:

Lynk, M. (2024) ‘We come from the sea’: American artist Joan Jonas on the pull of oceans and Cape Breton, CBC. Ideas in the Afternoon, Radio One. Available at: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artist-joan-jonas-cape-breton-and-oceans-1.7358491 (Accessed: 19 November 2024).

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning (2024) The Museum of Modern Art. MoMA. Available at: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5367 (Accessed: 19 November 2024).

Jonas, J. (2023) Joan Jonas in ‘Fiction’ – Season 7 – ‘Art in the Twenty-First Century’ | Art21, YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/x2WkckhWRxw?si=NhphxzLbyAm498tq (Accessed: 19 November 2024).

Working in the Unknown at the Edge of Knowing

Tuesday, 26 November 2024

In again watching Dr. Michele Whiting’s video lecture “Meaning Making/Making Meaning”, I am reminded of the power of full body memory. I am reminded about how much information is gathered that is not necessarily at first accessible through immediate recall of images or words but rather through sensations that were so very necessary before we developed a human capacity for language and naming – possibly the world of an infant or early humans. I sense that we do not lose these capacities but rather that they are often embedded beneath our quick short-hand ability to classify and organize information into meaning through naming and language of what we see and experience. 

This brings me to the question of representation in art making, as distinct from visual imitation in art making. This has been a vexing problem for me and it is one I come back to again and again in my practice. Painting an ocean in my practice has less to do with the visual curve of a wave and much more to do with smell of the sea and the feel and temperature of the air and the impermanence of natural light and the specific sounds of water and shore birds – yet, in the end, there is often a wave and a horizon line that orients the viewer inside of the seascape to feel as much as observe this full body and sensory moment. I will not fully unpack this tension right at the moment but rather put the problem here as a placeholder to come back to again later. 

Next, let’s have a look at the progress I made last week on the 40 x 30 inch acrylic, oil and broken china on wood with the working title “Middens in Bennett Bay.” 

I worked upside down to layout and attach the broken china.

Before doing this, I had developed the composition first with a few lines in pencil and then blocked in the underpainting with acrylic.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I have chosen a composition that is a vertical slice of earth revealed through erosion in such a way that the most of the surface has a narrow depth of field, holding space and time in the shapes of the shells and then releasing the viewer into an empty sky. For this work, flat colour is being considered for the aspects above ground combined with a more representational illusion of a three dimensional view below ground that is broken by the symbolic red line and broken china. This is then contained within the notion of a slice of earth exposing the passage of time. I am using the red line to represent climate impacts. Broken china is used to symbolize colonialism. The final colour of sky to represent space and mood. I am asking myself – what does it mean as a white woman of European settler culture in 2024 painting the eroding Indigenous middens from 4,000 or more years ago on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People? Who is my intended audience?

Here is a close up of the bits of broken china before I attached it with heavy body acrylic medium to the red acrylic painted wood surface.

Next is to continue the over painting with oil paints.The overpainting, except for the red line, will not be so bright but I am not sure what shades of grey, green and muted purples it will be yet. We shall see once I start working.

I also want to record that my physical situation has taken an unexpected turn following what should have been a short break on Saturday to attend my son’s wedding in Vancouver. Upon my return Sunday evening, as I pulled into the driveway, my husband fell getting up out of his chair when he stood to greet me and broke his hip. After an ambulance arrived and paramedics assessed the situation, a water taxi ambulance was ordered to get him and me off the island to the Victoria General hospital. Following a night in an overcrowded emergency ward, he has now had x-rays and CT scan and was moved to a hospital room in a unit while he waits for possible surgery. 

After a full night’s sleep, I now think I have a plan to be able to continue my schooling, possibly by using a digital drawing and painting app called “Art Set” part of the time that will allow me to work from a raw start digitally as if I were using physical tools but in a digital format. Here is an example of such work from about a year ago.

I have little experience with this app which in a way might be useful, if one wants to work in the unknown at the edge of knowing as discussed in Dr. Michele Whiting’s video lecture. 

I may possibly miss this week’s class on Thursday, November 28th, however, I am confident that after that I will have it sorted, though it is likely to be a challenging six months ahead until my husband heals and becomes more independent again.

DRIFTING WITH AN EBBING TIDE

Tuesday, 3 December 2024

I am still in flux drifting from place to place since Saturday, November 23, 2024 when I went to my son’s wedding gathering in Vancouver, British Columbia. Upon my return Sunday evening I came through the door to my husband laying on the floor with a broken hip that required an ambulance, a water taxi ambulance to get to the larger Vancouver Island in the dark, rain and rough water where we transferred to another ambulance and eventually made it to the emergency room forty minutes later. By this time it’s after 11:00 pm. Around 2:00 am X-rays confirmed the break and I  reached a hotel room, showered and went to bed at 3:00 am. I stayed there for a second night and then moved to stay with family for a few days before moving to stay with other family members for the duration of David’s hospital stay in Victoria, British Columbia. Surgery has been successful, rehabilitation is underway and his release and home are a matter of days away rather than weeks. 

In all of this, I did miss one live online class. However, my focus has remained strong and connected to my art practice and studies. I am more emotionally exhausted than physically tired. Plans are in place to be back on Mayne Island for my call early on Thursday morning. From there, everything should become more steady. 

In the meantime, in addition to my regular daily walks in nature over the past week, I did a digital sketch today just to remind me of the sea and shore. 

Artist notes: Seashells crouch in a soup of life with a receding tide. I breathe in and let out a ragged exhale. I am remembering this moment for comfort and strength. I am remembering to gain inner peace and access reserve strength. I can do this, I tell myself. I can do this.

There is no separating life from my art practice. One aspect has always influenced and impacted the other in unexpected ways. Together they provide me with a sense of wholeness. I do not know yet how these latest events will change both my life and art. I just know that they will.