Reflection by Tim Sheesley
Walking into the forest a few years ago I came across a large pile of spruce pinecones. They were carefully piled up by energetic red squirrels planning to store up a winter supply of food. That year there was an over production of cones on the trees I had planted some twenty years earlier, which turned out to be that year’s source of abundant food for those industrious tree-dwelling bushy tailed creatures. The notion of abundance struck me as an honorable theme for a series of modestly sized color lithographs.
On occasion, and especially during the harvest season, a deposit of produce from our garden or other sign of abundance will show up on our soapstone kitchen island and catch my eye. Transforming these visual encounters in to prints has become an obsession. Generally, they result in a simple square composition with out much editing going against the common advice not to put the subject in the center of the composition.
They are about having more than enough and gratitude for whatever happens to show up on the kitchen counter. So far pinecones, apples, roses, hogheart tomatoes, and blueberries have found their way from the flat marbled soapstone to smooth drawing surface of limestone.
