Britt Block
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” — Hereclitus
My paintings are about Time. I spend time in Nature, capturing moments in the wild on my phone which I then bring back to my studio. I spend time choosing, curating, selecting, and cropping the image. I print an image on regular paper. I mark it out with a one inch grid on the back, labeling each square so I know where it belongs in the painting. In the studio, I take each one inch square of paper and translate it into usually a four or five inch square on the 400 grit sanded paper surface I use. So an 8 x 10 print becomes a 40 x 50 painting, or whatever size I feel calls me. Usually, I work quite large. As I work on the painting, I try to resolve each section in and of itself – both as a mini painting, and as a part of the whole. I integrate and shape details and colors as I move through the process. In the end, the viewer is unable to tell that there was a grid. The process is meditative.
I focus on the simple language of nature: rocks, water, leaves, fruit blossoms. Each of these has endless iterations. Multiples. And yet each situation is unique, and the simplest moments can provide a portal that transports one out of the mundane and into the radiant ground and underlying aliveness that surrounds us. As a reflection of this, the underpainting for all of my works are fluorescent, neon colors which sometimes peek through- giving us a glimpse of the radiant light within the world.
So in the end, the paintings are about presence. They are about the radiant and healing transcendent beauty of the earth, about Nature’s redemptive power, about the glimpse into the eternal that we get abiding with the land. And they are for me also about showing up inside my experience day after day, saying yes to everything, being present with all of it, true to all of it, witnessing the river flowing through me and witnessing myself as the river, and the flow of change.
