A Green Thought in a Green Shade was created for Coalesce 2024.
Coalesce 2024 featured twenty Orange County-based artists: ten poets and ten visual artists, hosted by the Orange County Arts Commission at the Eno Arts Mill, and curated by Max and Morrow Dowdle. The selected artists were matched in pairs; each poet creating a poem based on a visual work by their partner, and each visual artist creating a work based on a poem submitted by the poet. The resulting exhibit featured twenty works of visual art paired with twenty poems.
I was honored to be selected as one of the visual artists for Coalesce 2024, partnered with distinguished poet Jeffery Beam. Jeffery’s work spans more than four decades, and is hailed for its "transcendent, lush beauty, its minimal sacrament, simplicity and physicality" creating “conversation between the natural world, the body, and the spirit.” 
My personal connection to Jeffery likewise goes back more than four decades, so it is my great delight that we were matched for Coalesce.
The poem Jeffery selected for me was excerpted from a longer work, The Green Man’s Man, published in his volume Gospel Earth (2010). The lines in Jeffery’s poem are abundantly full of imagery easily related to my body of landscape work, and sparked a multitude of ideas for paintings. I ultimately selected the image of a landscape inspired by previous paintings of nearby New Hope Creek, then embedded with a Green Man face. The title “A Green Thought in a Green Shade” is a line from the poem The Garden by seventeenth century poet Andrew Marvell, as referenced in Jeffery’s Green Man’s Man poem.
Jeffery created a new poem in response to my artwork, This.
Broadsides featuring all of the paired artists and poets can be purchased at the Eno Arts Mill in Hillsborough.