"Into the Center" by Jean Golicz and Deb Paulson
Meet the Artists on August 23
Jean Golicz and Deb Paulson have plans for visitors to their new exhibition, “Into the Center,” opening this Sunday at Mary C. Daly RSM Art Gallery. They’re hoping their collection of poems and paintings brings viewers to a luminous threshold — a sacred space where soul and spirit meet. On Sunday, Aug. 23, from 2 to 5 p.m., they’ll be on hand to share their own journeys throughout the process of creating “Into the Center.”
The exhibit is the second in a series by the two friends, following last year’s “Into the Light.” Golicz says the process took center stage. She says they examined “how we’re moving in a certain direction that can be illuminated, shadowed and centered with regard to a space or a place.”
During that process, Golicz’s poems, written in the ancient Japanese lyric form of tanka, came first. Each poem, she says, was shaped through prayer along the liminal spaces of the Mercy by the Sea shoreline. Uniting every poem and painting: luminosity.
Paulson, meanwhile, started researching luminosity in watercolor and found the technique of the late painter Nita Engle. The method begins by soaking the paper, then laying down concentrated washes of the three transparent primaries — yellow where the light source will be, red beside it, blue on the outside — and misting, tipping and turning the sheet until the pigments blend on their own. After that foundation dries, she paints in the image. “I knew this was the process I wanted to use for this show because it echoes the surrender and luminosity we’re trying to get to,” she says. “It’s both spontaneous, sort of controlled, but not really controlled.”
Neither artist knew where the other would land. What they did know: when their two art forms come together, something special happens. “It’s a symbiosis,” Paulson says of their pairing. “I don’t think either is as powerful without the other.”
As for getting visitors to that aforementioned threshold, Paulson says the way is “extremely spiritual, because you can only get to the center by surrendering your personal ego.” She describes it as a process and a journey where preferences arise from the ego. “The ego arises from this sort of psyche that all your fears or good things have built up. If you can dismantle all of that through your life and get to the center, then that’s luminosity.”
For Golicz, that surrender is what she hopes visitors carry out the door. “The most important thing is this idea that as we center ourselves, we’re simultaneously open to the spirit, open to the divine and being able to hear that voice.”
"Into the Center" is on display through October 1. View it at Mercy by the Sea’s Mary C. Daly RSM Art Gallery, which is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Please call 203-245-0401 in advance of your visit to ensure we're open. Admission is free.