'Words of a Feather'

Statement from artist Laurel Justice:

When I once heard that the size of Emily Dickinson’s desk was a scant 18″ X 18″, I was moved to consider the simplicity from which her brilliance sprung.  Between the desk, her quill, and the mesh of her soul, the world gets to chew on 1100-plus poems forevermore.

It occurred to me that I would like to paint a series of pieces in an 18″ X 18″ format, while contemplating her words, other people’s words, my own words, just good words.  Like many visual artists, I am a story teller, gathering images from my life and surroundings, and responding to them from the mesh of my 21st-century soul, awash in complexities, longings, distractions, useless anxieties, joys and wonderment.

To sit with square substrates (a fancy word for the artist’s version of a desk) daily, along with some life-giving poetry, and my own cluttered mind proved to be an exercise in becoming present to myself in altogether new ways.

I primarily work in abstract, using pastel, and these paintings are a journey through the ideas and emotions, dissonances and resolutions, resistances and surrenders, that make up the landscape of both the universal and modern-day challenges of becoming humanized.