By Noell Goldberg
In the paintings of Elizabeth Slayton, a Diamond Approach student and teacher, it is not idea, but inspiration that guides the emergence of the image and the exploration of the many ways light reveals the particularity of the subject. Whether it is a pear, an onion, a magnolia blossom—or these days, canvases covered in intense color—she often discovers that the paintings perfectly reflect the current movement of her soul, and sometimes, the paintings herald what lies ahead. My recent conversation with the artist revealed an extraordinary intimacy between the outer work of making art and the inner work of the soul’s development and realization.
Years ago, Elizabeth began a series of paintings: soft, almost cloud-like renderings of a child-being hunkered down in a cave, the presence of another animal-being nearby. The child-being longed for contact with an expanded world and knowledge of how to step beyond the containing boundaries of the known. The images became the story and book, Kodah and Me. And to her surprise, this narrative of hiding and eventual emergence reflected Elizabeth’s own opening into a larger world and a knowing of new dimensions of herself.
Elizabeth started her painter’s life with watercolors—soft, pastel, atmospheric images without definition or boundaries. As she says, “The images were hidden in a fog. That was me.” But just as the book’s character began to emerge from the cave, taking on relationship, showing up more fully in life, so did Elizabeth. After a dry spell and perhaps a recalibration of her artistic impulse and a shift in the soul, Elizabeth began a series of still-lifes. They were small in scale, unassuming, and spoke quietly to the viewer…rather, says Elizabeth, like herself.
Then, she painted a pear, and a fellow Diamond Approach student said, “I love the belly of the pear!” While Elizabeth couldn’t figure out what that meant, she began painting pears, each with a belly that went beyond the edges of the canvas. The painting prefaced her process, a movement beyond the familiar boundaries of self and world. The pear didn’t stop at the edge of the canvas; Elizabeth didn’t stop at the edges of who she had previously known herself to be.
Now, something new moved, opened, expanded, took definite and particular shape on the canvas and in the soul. “I paint what I love,” Elizabeth says, “and what I love the most is the way light shows up.” She began painting magnolia blossoms—fluid, soft, unfolding into their fullness—images that reflected what she came to see as her own fleshing out, expansion, and unfoldment. The softness of earlier work, a certain vagueness of image, now had a new meaning, softness as the determined but delicate movement of life finding expression.
Like the Diamond Approach practice of inquiry and the impulse to know the truth, the impulse to paint brings the artist’s open and deep attention to the question: What is this ginkgo leaf, this particular pear, this singular blast of color? As Elizabeth says, “The more I know the particularity, the more I know the thing I’m painting,” says Elizabeth. “There is a love that arises, not unlike the love that arises in knowing who and what we are.”