Sharalee Lewis
The River in Me
22 x 30

Watercolor on Paper

The idea for this painting came one night at the Vancouver Press Club, when I was listening to an incredible singer-songwriter, Megan Metcalfe. While she was singing a song she had written called “The River in Me” I saw my next painting,

Marina Papais, a Vancouver glass artist, brought me a gift of a piece of cedar bark, which she found on her run by a dam near where we lived. I had been struggling with this painting and the cedar was exactly what the painting needed. Cedar in the First Nations tradition stands for the truth.

When the river is tainted, everything begins to die off because, as we know from environmental biology, every life form is dependent on every other life form. When creativity stagnates in one way or another, there is the same outcome: a starving for freshness, a fragility of life, a dwindling of fertility, no place for small life forms to live in the interstices of larger life forms, no breeding of this idea to that one, no hatching, no new life. Then we feel ill and want to move on. We wander aimlessly, pretending we can get along without the lush creative life or else by faking one, but we cannot, must not. To bring back creative life, the waters have to be made clean and clear again. We have to wade into the sludge, purify the water, reopen the aperture and protect the flow from further harm.



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Sharalee Lewis
The River in Me

22 x 30

Watercolor on Paper

The idea for this painting came one night at the Vancouver Press Club, when I was listening to an incredible singer-songwriter, Megan Metcalfe. While she was singing a song she had written called “The River in Me” I saw my next painting,

Marina Papais, a Vancouver glass artist, brought me a gift of a piece of cedar bark, which she found on her run by a dam near where we lived. I had been struggling with this painting and the cedar was exactly what the painting needed. Cedar in the First Nations tradition stands for the truth.

When the river is tainted, everything begins to die off because, as we know from environmental biology, every life form is dependent on every other life form. When creativity stagnates in one way or another, there is the same outcome: a starving for freshness, a fragility of life, a dwindling of fertility, no place for small life forms to live in the interstices of larger life forms, no breeding of this idea to that one, no hatching, no new life. Then we feel ill and want to move on. We wander aimlessly, pretending we can get along without the lush creative life or else by faking one, but we cannot, must not. To bring back creative life, the waters have to be made clean and clear again. We have to wade into the sludge, purify the water, reopen the aperture and protect the flow from further harm.