Galiano
It has all been heard
before. Sun bursting
open green leaves and
falling. Browned, crunching
under foot’s pressure
heralding audience
to this island’s call
and response, that Jesus’
promised stone chorus
would cry. Water
weight bolts toward rock’s
tempo-loving home,
spitting moisture up
wood-wind trunks, branches,
and through fragile grasses
also split open
by sun’s glare crackling,
like light off the
sea channel’s loose skin.
Shout perpetually on
song of wood, rock, home.
Artist Statement
The multi-step development of collage work appeals to notions of process, building, and collecting. A hunt must ensue to gather bits of magazine images or colors that will eventually relate the possibility of beauty and cohesiveness amid their fractured and fragmentary display.
The visually chaotic surface rendered by these gathered images are eventually overlaid with organic painted shapes. These crudely, hand-derived circles connote relationship, entities, that shift through the query of their placement on the field and their proximity with each other. They are individual forms, simultaneously repelled yet desiring one another. Painting on these fractured surfaces serves the impulse towards unity, to usher in connectedness. Overall, the painting process signifies hopeful movement towards relationality. Humanity is not as isolated as it perceives itself.
This is a watercolor of the view we have from our Galiano family home. The depicted island across the channel is Salt Spring. Galiano is one of the gulf islands between mainland Vancouver and Vancouver Island in BC. Brian’s parents are part of a co-op of sorts that was started 20 years ago by Regent faculty. We visit every other summer for a family reunion.
MARIA FEE Before starting her PhD in Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, Maria served as an arts ministry coordinator in the Center For Faith & Work (CFW), Redeemer Presbyterian Church. She was the visual coordinator for various Redeemer projects and facilitated collaborative programs such as the in-house literary magazine, creative showcase night, the writers vocation group, and an annual juried exhibition. Maria is currently a visual advisor for the Brehm Center facilitating exhibitions in Fuller Seminary’s David Allan Hubbard Library gallery. She continues her work of nurturing artists through their creative projects as an instructor for Fuller’s Capstone Theology and Art course.