No. 18 Vol. 3
www.mypaperonline.com
March 2022
Nature is a Dreamland in Denville Painter’s Skilled Hands
N
By Alexander Rivero ext time you make a cup of tea, take the time to focus on the individual steps that make up that perfect steaming cup of herbal bliss. Pour the water. Notice the sound the water makes as it hits the bottom of the kettle. See how it instantly takes the shape of its container. Observe how the water splashes and ripples as it accommodates itself, the chaos of billions of individual droplets rushing to find their place in this new reality, only to fuse together as one body once again. After about a minute, when you’ve lit the stove and placed the kettle on the burner, watch the bobbing water as it steadies into stiller and stiller versions of itself. Before long, it will have become a zen pond, on its way to boil over the low hissing stovefire. Maybe it is a bit much to assume we can be this tuned in to the nobler details of tea preparation while tripping over Legos and scarfing down an egg before work. But graphic design artist and painter Amanda McIntyre of Denville believes we stand to gain much more than we think by taking the time to see the miraculous in the every-day, the even every-minute. “Beauty is in everything we do. I’ve dealt with anxiety, and doing meditation helped immensely. Making a cup of tea, for instance, and focusing on it—truly focusing on it—and enjoying it, the whole process of it, not just the consumption of it, matters immensely. To see things in this light—the focusing on each component of it whenever possible—has been extraordinarily helpful for me for quite some time.” An avid hiker, McIntyre’s memory banks are filled with scenes of the local natural world, many of which so beautiful she has had to stop and take full notice. But instead of trying to capture the vision with a camera or sketchbook, she typically pauses and allows the beauty to sear itself into her memory, where it incubates for a time before emerging again on her canvas. It certainly helps to have the poise and delicateness of hand to paint pieces as lush as hers—qualities which she has in spades. However, it is her sharp and patient eye, which is as sensitive to the breadth as it is to the depth and detail of her subjects, that has done most to help her produce her repertoire—a dreamworld of shape, texture, symbols,
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