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FULL LIFE STORY
Join us for a very special event:
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FULL LIFE STORY:
Paintings by Thekla Hammond
Vocal performance by Sine Nomine and Caritas
February 21, 2016, 3:00 pm
Terra Gallery and Events
511 Harrison (at First Street)
San Francisco, 94105
RSVP to save your seat theklahammond@theklahammond.com
Download full press release
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FULL LIFE STORY:
I felt a rush of almost erotic excitement as I approached the pallet and contemplated putting my hands in the gooshy, luscious, oil paint. This time I wanted the paint itself to tell the story; I would be the student.
The opening image in Jim Crace's novel harvest began to haunt me. There is a fire, seen from a distance, on a cold, frosty autumn day. The fire and the smoke are both beautiful and ominous, and they signal the end of the way of life for people living on a manor in medieval England. I wanted to paint this image, to see it, and to explore its meaning.
The exploration embraced the seemingly contrary and opposite characteristics that comprise a full life story. In Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis called it "full catastrophe living." William Faulkner referred to it as "the outrage of life." In a full life story, there must always be dichotomies -- beauty and ugliness, safety and danger, passion and reserve, good and evil, sacred and profane, love and hate, life and death.
After a number of the paintings were completed I discovered, through the suggestion of my critic, that this full ilfe story was my own. It addressed the threat to my health that I didn't know about consciously when I began the series. The paint did tell me the story.
~ Thekla Hammond
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