Summer Flowers

The pain will be born from that look cast inside yourself, and this pain will make you go beyond the veil.

-- Rumi

Suma III, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

The surface
of the water
mirrors many things.
-- Masami Kato (1825)

Suma II, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

...[T]he inner risks to the psyche that the best artists face every time they make work are much harder to quantify and to judge with dubious terms like "good" or "bad," "success" or "failure." This is the inner dimension of art, far beyond the reach of critics and curators. It is the path of practice, of doing, of riding the crest of the wave of the moment with no thought as to where it will land, or whether there are rocks just below the surface, or if the Self will survive the fall. This constant falling, the incessant quest for some unknown thing beneath, beyond, or just out of reach...
-- Bill Viola, "Artist to Artist," in Art in America, February 2010, p 64.

Suma I, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

On the whole, however, modern art is not a denial but an affirmation. Like most of our scientists, the process of disintegration or analysis is not a wanton act of destruction but part of a process for the evolving of more comprehensive synthesis. And therefore modern artists have not left us merely with the members of the body of art strewn about, but they have reassembled them and revivified that body with their own breath of life. In short, they have attempted to regain a synthesis as complete as that of the primitive, based of course, upon contemporary considerations and point of view.
-- Mark Rothko, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (Yale University Press, 2004), page 61.