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Christin Couture is a visual artist – a painter.  With a mystic-like sensibility, she contemplates the world around her and colors it dreamy, or witty, or mysterious, or  mad-science fantastical and often all of the above.  Working solo or collaborating with her husband, 3-D artist William Hosie, Christin’s work is a meditation on the organic and the synthetic manifestations of life’s circumstances and mysteries.

Christin Couture’s new intimate landscape paintings are currently exhibited at Ursa Major Gallery located in Shelburne Falls, MA through May 27th so find your way there soon!  Here’s a a brief and lovely description of the work from the gallery’s press release:

For over a decade in all weather and seasons Christin has drawn, painted, photographed, and filmed from a precipice overlooking Salmon Falls, her  ’nearest faraway place’ close to her home in Shelburne Falls. Its protean nature converges in a spectacle of light and mood constantly colliding and shifting yet retaining its iconic form as place. From such a bonding fully understood moments unfold their monumental intimacy.  Afterwardm in the studio, using various mediums and tools – oil, beeswax, pigment, acrylic, colored pencils, fingertips, brushes, knives… the process itself challenges her to reflect this feeling of eternal wildness joined by rapture

More images of The Nearest Faraway Place paintings can glimpsed here.

Please also check out more of Christin’s and William’s work on their magical website Redtindebluefire.

I loved looking at the paintings over and over again when I saw the exhibit.  Each time I would notice something new and each time it felt like I was looking into this beautiful, secret world where all may not be what it seems, yet it’s safe to enter and get lost for a while.

5/25/13

Untitled (at least for now) © Monika Sosnowski

The last two weeks have been challenging. Physically, emotionally and creatively. Forced by circumstances beyond my control, I had to retreat for a while. I’ve rediscovered sleep and the benefits of doing the minimum. We all need some form of help when healing. Touch is magic.

Back to the process. Back to work. This morning back to the morning commute. Re-entering the familiar world as if I never left it, yet two weeks is two weeks. And the frustration of again having to carve out time, and make room, and juggle, juggle, juggle. Enough.

Learn to focus again. Sort of like the healing process where you just have to take one thing at a time.

5/23-24/13

Remain © Monika Sosnowski

WHERE DO YOUR DREAMS SLEEP NOW

Where do your dreams sleep now
where do your fears nest
where do your hungers growl
A planet falls out of the hand
Where do your snows nap
timid fawns curious hares
gentle doves stubborn paths

every evening I lie down at their side

                 – poem by Anna Kamieńska

5/21/13

Untitled (Balladyna Cukiernia) © Monika Sosnowski

The elusive past. The unwritten. forgotten, swept under the rug kind. Is there really any other?
And yet all it takes is one glance at a little photograph. Taken so long ago it will elicit scratching of the head even for those who might have something to say about it.
Something gets stirred. Awaken. A tiny chance to fill in just one blank. Possibly.

5/19/13

Glimmer, 2012-13 © Monika Sosnowski

At last a small breakthrough. Something is beginning to come into view and though I still cannot fully comprehend the form or the meaning, I trust it. This pairing finally opens up for me a way in. There’s few others I’ve discovered that I sort of ignored for about a year. I’ve been thinking a lot again about my pilgrimage last April to the place I hold so very, very dear to my heart. To go back is sometimes the only way to go forward.

When I first started working on this project I found the poetry of Anna Kamienska to be particularly poignant and helpful. Even the working title, ‘The Tenderness of Things,’ comes from one of her poems. And here’s my motto:

“Into this space step alone
and the tenderness of things will enfold you
and lead you towards the dark
as if you had lost worldly sight
– Anna Kamienska

Thank you.

4/28/13

© Monika Sosnowski

Untiled (White Chair), 2012

Another project.  The detritus of once upon a time.

4/26/13

Point of departure or return. More like a pause. Looking at this moment, at his moment in time and place, from a perspective of a lot of time gone by, this snapshot has already transformed itself to so many other meanings and possibilities. I thought I at least remembered the general circumstances when I pressed the button on my iPhone. So I searched for proof of my impeccable memory and discovered I was wrong.
One thing is certain – I was on a walk with Ruby. And so even though she’s not pictured here, and neither am I for that matter, this tiny moment exist because of her. This is not a tribute just a reflection.

Today I looked at it and it made me think of longing and connections. But also of certain impossibilities and distance. But also of the way things come up against each other and interweave in a dance. Symbiosis.

4/26/13