Karen Terry “Becoming Shadow” acrylic on canvas

For many years I attended 5Rhythms ecstatic movement workshops with Gabrielle Roth, her son Jonathan Horan and other skilled 5Rhythms facilitators. The 5Rhythms is a moving meditation map comprised of flowing, saccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness processes, each with actionable attributes and practices. The themed workshops, both part of and stemming from the map, incorporated theater and other embodied techniques for exploration, learning, expression, connecting and release. This often resulted in a sense of shape/ self shifting. Exercises would include taking on ex-aggerated as well as shadow side behaviors, as experienced in one’s self and others, to give those aspects space and recognition. Shadow side awareness, when practiced in an embodied manner, is strong medicine for healing and growth. Becoming Shadow is a low light acrylic painting that provides a soft deep natural environment and, as opposed to portraying the dark shadow side of human behaviors, presents the meditative solace of a holy shadow being. Becoming Shadow provides a glimpse of a shrouded figure, separate but integrally part of the difuse shadowy landscape; a shape shifter who is leaving one internal domain and entering another – emptied of ego but perhaps not of longing. The individual disappears and the shadow being becomes present. The painting techniques that I use enable me to work with form and energy to create low light images of the environment, generally without the use of hard lines. My images tap into visual and sensory memory and a universality that extends beyond my own experience. My exploration of space and form, of ambiance and energy, primarily includes use of the sumi ink and acrylic mediums.Becoming Shadow was painted using moderated tonality with color. With acrylic paintings, I apply the paint in opaque and transparent layers and sense the life held in the painting; allowing it to speak. My love of nature, combined with individual and collective experi-ence, informs the sensitivity of my subject matter. My use of color provides a tonal representativeness in tandem with the richness of the prevailing field. I incorporate iridescence in my paintings in subtle manner, which informs the lighting and provides a reflected glo. I transferred my training in oil painting to the acrylic medium and use a palette in the expression of my subject matter that carries the lineage of my training.