The Beginning of the Bedrock series
Bedrock is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the solid rock underlying unconsolidated surface materials.”
The first time I remember noticing bedrock was as a child, riding with my family from the flat plains of central Alabama into Birmingham, where the landscape dramatically changes. The foothills of the Appalachian Mountains originate in northern Alabama, and the interstate which brings you into Birmingham cuts through the bedrock which underlies these foothills. I remember being fascinated with the layers of multi-colored rock, the crevices which held tiny treasures and miniature waterfalls, and the lone trees which pushed through the almost imperceptible cracks in the solid rock to find life. I didn’t know it then, but one day these open-faced slices of geologic history would become inspiration for a series of paintings - and maybe more than one.
Fast forward to the spring of 2020, when the whole world shut down. During the lockdown, my kids and I took a LOT of drives as a way of staying sane. With the uninterrupted time in the car, I began to notice these swaths of bedrock again - some naturally formed outcroppings and some sliced through by man in the process of forming roadways. The world was topsy turvy, so many unknowns, relationships strained; and all of this happened during the season of the Christian year called Lent. I began painting a small painting every day as a lenten practice, and this bedrock kept showing up in my watercolors, along with the question, “Is there Bedrock underneath?” When all else is falling apart, I think we collectively wondered if there was something more sturdy, more long-lasting under all that was falling apart around us.
Fast forward one more time to early spring of this year. I had been thinking a lot and sketching around the idea of light and shadow, but I went back to reread some old journal entries from the spring of 2020 and got fascinated by the idea of bedrock again. One painting turned into another and then another, and my studio started filling up with these explorations around bedrock. The world changed irrecoverably in the spring of 2020, but I believe, no matter the changes that have come or will come, there lies beneath us something more solid than anything we can trust in this world.