Veronica Sheer: Twenty-seven Days in the Life of an Amaryllis

Opening Reception this Friday

 March 3, 2023

 5-7pm 

Twenty-seven Days in the Life of an Amaryllis

Artist Statement 

….so my brush just brushes by, does not hang onto anything and often loses what it finds and has to rush up ahead where it escaped to in a sometimes harrowing game of hide and seek for a hunter who’s hungry for game.  And then when I finally get close, I suddenly have compunctions about impaling such a beautiful beast, so in the end I only graze it as it limps away (not permanently wounded I hope) and I remain hungry and then feel guilty that I intruded and bothered the beast gratuitously and also about returning from my failed hunt for the present empty handed with only the barest bones of a wan story, say, a store bought plant, suggestions of the surface it sits on, a lamp or vase, maybe a taped up map of Rome — those idols I can’t bring myself to shatter, which would be to tamper with the scene before the case is decisively cracked.  A fresco by Giotto that I’ve been slow drip tripping on for decades tells me to keep looking,  however the newspapers printed up a premature verdict that leaked out, and now everybody “knows” and has for some time been laying the given scene to waste, tearing apart the fabric in the long long — yawn —  night of this endless mindless (including yammering intellectual-ish), raging Dionysian orgy in slow or fast motion, whatever, as the clocks have gone crazy. Thank God I found this ancient one on a street in Italy and instantly synchronized — it must be my royal blood -- with its regal regularity.  It dutifully marks the midnight hour that I dutifully arrive to revere my muse, as my brush awkwardly caresses her image moving through time, my clock ticks clicking like a metronome for a Couperin consort of viols, until I lose her again and again and then again give up, yet gathering clues here and there, highly satisfied that I’ve managed to cordon off the scene, far from the madding crowds, and confident as always that I will eventually nail the culprit. Meanwhile — amore amaryllis, heroic flower with as many finales as a Beethoven symphony!

Veronika