.

This page expresses my unceasing devotion to beauty, creativity and the deep language of "soul". I am an artist by profession; however, I love art so much that I would draw, paint and write even if I was the last human left on the planet.

Most of the paintings displayed here have been sold; prints can be arranged, though, for a reasonable price. Some originals are still available, and I do accept commissions. These days, I also accept chickens, butter and clothing (and other goods and services) in lieu of typical currency. :)

I will post paintings as they are finished and as space allows; please SCROLL DOWN or see the archives to view all of them.

If you are interested in a purchase, please contact me directly at: aka.rhiannon@gmail.com.

Enjoy!

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Eternity's Sunrise

oil on canvas, 30"x40", sold

Monday, August 22, 2011

Monday, March 8, 2010

Must be in the Blood

From a barren place, no desert ship in sight,
He asked, “Do you get seasick?”
I paused at the span of years since I last
went sailing.
“Um…”
Seated on the bow, flying, ocean kisses all over my face…
Harbor in the afternoon where I massacred an oyster
in curious horror. She gifted me upon her death
a perfect eight-millimeter miniature
of a dusky moon on a nighttime sea.

“Why do you ask?” was all I said.

Casually lounging the waves with an otter and
his abalone breakfast…
Facing early extinction in a watery vacuum pulling me out,
out of the cove, until with a bloody grip on a barnacled rock,
I crawled up to air in gratitude.

“Well, I love the ocean, “ He replied, “and I don’t think I ever asked…”

Coral-replicating rivulets
in copper evening sand, spread like big hands
holding the fiery ball of sun…
Driftwood being human art, with shells and seagull feathers dancing,
Or blessing smoke, like incense over small beach gatherings…
Holy stones and smooth glass jewels,
whalebones and fossils so
familiar, I can’t help but remember
the web of tiny fetal fingers floating
in that first cradle.

“I felt sick, once when my brother was, on the boat,
but that was all,” I concluded.

Knots of kelp, seatree caress, ropes of gold in briny bondage…
Expressionless sharks bearing the unknown in perfect teeth
with perfect truth in their eyes…
Crying to my Mother when I was lost, longing to drown again
in her arms…wanting her there
at my one true wedding
when I finally found my way home.

(If you were landlocked, said my brother once, I think you’d die!)

“Soon,” my Love promised, “we’ll go sailing.”
I could feel him smile.
I may be a mermaid with legs.

Sweetness

What if I stopped fighting and fell into the vat of
What Is?
And instead of drowning, found myself filled with
warm, orange honey…
and it filled up every cell of the body, breathing itself just fine…
no room for fear, because all of the within or without spaces were suddenly
warm, orange honey.

What if open eyes saw that everything, everything is,
in fact, warm orange honey?

No longing for sweetness when the tongue becomes what it craves.
No avoiding the hollows when that is where warmth lives.
No future of need when it has already become what yesterday is---
warm, orange honey.

What would I do, what would I do in an endless universe of warm, orange
honey?
I couldn’t run from it
hide from it
have more of it
or control it
since it is me and I am it and so is everything else…
an absolute abundance of warm, orange honey,
in an infinite number of shapes, sizes and densities, all of them
actually
warm, orange honey.

Dusk

Nothing special this mild, March evening, light fading,
walking, digesting;
walking without my glasses, needing no detail
to bring me wood smoke and perfume
from someone’s clothes dryer.
Could be any neighborhood, quiet, after dinner.
Walking in the street because traffic is
elsewhere, slowly, because I can.
The bottoms of my shoes are thin. I feel
intimate density, each step,
thinking, This is how I love,
this is how I love!

To us

Get used to being adored.
It is only what you deserve.
Pretend you are god, and you know so much
that it’s more fun not to know.
Don’t be surprised, when you step ahead,
that the earth obediently turns under your feet;
or that every time you open your eyes,
you grace this space with color, line and form.
Your power is such that a word or a tear
can break my heart.
And when you open yours,
the entire universe
rushes in to at last be home
where it belongs.


Birthing Pool

Back in the desert, I used to dream of a place
green all year, where I could not imagine drought
except as an abstract concept.
Awake now,
the dream has granted me a grove
where ocean meets the rain;
persistent, subtle mists, and sprays and spates
in sideways walls of wet.

I wrap myself in plastic, to no avail,
for a determined hike on muffled trails, skirting
tiny bogs in open spaces, earth seeping back
what moss and ferns have given.
Every dissolving leaf or twig, every springing
fungus exhales an ancient, ancient perfume
of sharp, quick decay mixed with new, spring babyhood.

After a while, my face runs with rainy sea, sweat or tears.
I hear only my own heartbeat in this womb.

Today, at the end of my labored swim up the hill,
stripped of everything but love,
light spears the end of the fir tunnel
and opens the ocean cloud canopy
with diamonds.

Motion Sickness

To overcome the dizziness of the world,
first understand that you are
a whirlpool of a raging river,
a cyclone of an endless sky,
a spiral of the code of being.

Lie flat on the ground, the solid, still earth
while you contemplate the fact that you’re spinning
rapidly in space
in a galaxy that swirls your helpless self
into who-knows-what,
in a universe expanding who-knows-where.
Not only that!
From tick to tock,
the swing of the pendulum you make time with
can make you very ill, indeed.

So let go.
You’ll only float in the center
while you fly around
your edge.


Friday, March 5, 2010

"Moonlight Fairy", oil on canvas, private collection

"Arctic Beauty", oil on canvas, private collection

"North Altar", oil on canvas

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"The Artist and Her Father", oil on canvas, private collection

Education of an Artist

Technique and application
of learned skill—
very important.

Basic knowledge of past achievements
by illuminated dead,
balanced with the desire to create
something living on—
why not?

But the scent of your vision
the taste of the hawk’s cry on canvas
the feel of a universe pressing out, out from
your heart
goes without saying!


Sunday, February 21, 2010


"Grandma's Cabin", oil on canvas, sold


Finding Voice

Many years in this guesthouse,
there was a noisy place in the floor
I tried hard to avoid, so as not to wake the
sleeping people.

Forgetting, one day, I stepped just there.
The floor squeaked in surprise, causing someone to stir--!
I froze in fear of…

But a curiosity in the sound
bade me test my weight again.
The floor groaned in pain…
someone opened an eye, so I stopped
with unspoken apology,
hovering.

Until a secret joy in the gaze upon me
placed my foot, firmly, on that vocal spot
once more, and the floor
crackled in anger!
Someone sat bolt upright.

And I bounced a few times,
grinning at the awakened one
while the floor laughed in delight,
remembering my innocent self
sitting, rolling, dancing
in this singing place!


Friday, February 5, 2010

Tree Goddesses, oil on canvas, sold

Holy Leap

Go ahead, test the stability of the bridge
between your-and-Self.

Did you believe the chasm
was as merciless as the dull death
in your head?

Did you think it would reward the courage
of your wincing step
with nothing more than a cold fall, an abrupt stop
shaped like jagged rocks?

I know you can’t see it, I know it
has no logic,
but go ahead, jump out, land with both feet!
Swing your arms and dance across.
Stomp and laugh,
because a herd of elephants
could not sway this bridge,
suspended as it is from heaven,
rooted as it is in earth.


Thursday, January 28, 2010

HEART SHAPES

Walking the beach in a treasure day,
I was telling my brother
about stumbling upon heart shapes wherever I go
(the shape of your face in my hands),
and that my son once pointed out
how frequently this happens
(the shape of your hand on the small of my back),
since I had quite a collection
(the shape of your name on my tongue)
of found heart-shaped things.
Really, my brother said.
(the shape of the space around your form)
You know, it’s all in the patterns
(the shape of things to come)
that you recognize.
And I stopped to pick up a golden,
heart-shaped piece of agate, laughing.
(the shape of love)
Imagine that!

Back

Saturday, January 23, 2010


"Dragonglow", oil on canvas, sold


Heal

In this necessary nightmare,
wild wasteland of fallen angels and fractured wings,
I step over my own spilled blood and hear the
snap of fearful division,
smelling heat of hate on the wind.

Nothing seems to grow amid fortresses
of illness, under layers of mental cancer
and piles of our neglect.
Nothing seems to flow through
these huge dams of greed.

So easy to succumb to the swelling
of despair…

But compulsive lies collapse
gratefully, as do all things, into truth;
through the ruins I see layers of time
in canyon walls, the pattern of pulse
through all the apparent
heart failure.

There are signs of what moves underneath,
ancient evidence immune
to doubt.

Thirsty, heedless of bites and stings,
I lie on the parched bed of original flow
and put my ear and my naked belly
to this earth.

Listeners, feelers in the desert know
the ebb and flow of silent
subterranean current, washing clean
the wounds, mending the breaks and cooling
the fever of fear.
Even here,
I heal
in the place where sea meets sky;
even here I am
at home.

Back

Wednesday, January 13, 2010


Roses

How many deaths does it take to get to heaven?
If someone told me five years back
that I’d never left—but no, I needed
more dying.
I had to play one more kind of fool
and step off another cliff, with a different-colored rose
in my teeth.
Even upon impact, in the midst of the latest shattered role,
Love was the only thing that ever made sense.
I’d find myself somehow
resurrected,
walking the path to the top of the next ridge,
tasting a thorny stem. Again.

Last time, the fall was so long as I looked from the edge,
I just knew it went straight to hell.
I wanted to sit forever with the view in sharp relief
and a dead flower for companionship.

Grace had other ideas.
I swear I was pushed.
The fall was so long
that I had time to do somersaults and twists
and a complete review of many lives.
I had time to catch myself
in surrender,
even before my sudden landing
in your arms,
my rose safe in your teeth
beneath your laughing eyes.


Tuesday, January 12, 2010

"Comfort", oil on canvas, private collection

The Path of Devotion

Maybe midlife, and I’m still trying to hide
the worst of the scars, while
forgetting, more and more, what they look like.
The world doesn’t care, and toughly, tenderly
breathes me, in each moment,
bringing stories and pictures, green grass
and the smell of wet cedar.
Even when I imagined my abandonment or my prison,
the world arose with me each morning and
lay down to rest or restlessness
with me each night.
Obligingly,
It became the door I locked
or the key in my hand,
it loves me that much.

When I wanted something to break
other than glass, life brought me,
unquestioningly
a whole procession of breakable things
and promises and events.
Did I need layers to tear off in grief? It
dramatically
cried large, ripping sobs,
rocked back and forth with me in isolation
on the saltwater sea in my eyes.
Had I honestly wanted to drown,
it would have shaped itself
exquisitely
around me that way, rushed into my lungs
and every pore, until I was
perfectly saturated.
It loves me that much.

Form after form, thought after thought, age after age
is this devotion.
I must have felt it, somewhere,
deeply.
I must have known it was wiser than I.
There has always been some tiny shrine
for me to go, to see if this
is true…
it loves me so much.




"Canyon Goddess", oil on canvas, sold


Aquarius


I am the Ocean's daughter.
In my dream, the water has finally come.
I've descended through ashes, through the portal of my own footprint
into the underworld.

Risen from your breath and bled from your eyes,
I have carved new lines on the beautiful, ancient face always cast up
at the sky.
I am the lover-destroyer leaning upon
the greatest walls of stone and steel,
patiently filling every flaw, caressing away the hardest shell from the tender,
molten heart of this blessed Earth, whom
I carry to build upon her womb and fruit the hills and plains.
No bridge can span the width,
no dam can halt the flow
of this current.

I am the libation that cannot be grasped, but of which
you are ever born;
I will relax in your cupped hands,
conform to the shape of your mouth,
bathe away fear and float the innocent
within and upon me.
I sing to you in the rain and rivers,
rock through the waves as your
primal lullaby...the touches may be small
as mist or engulfing as a tide; give and take
by give and take, they change the shape
of this universe.

In my dream, the sun enters the day
through the West.
Water has split the great land
in two; there are new
shallow seas webbed by streams
and canals carrying boats filled with fruit
and rugs, herbs and animals of perennial wisdom.

I wade the late turquoise of afternoon
where the shoreline heals the wounds and the voices are few
and full.
Aquarius carries me on his strong back
tipping the vessel from then to now.
Empty your cup; pour it out
as an offering.





"Mussels and Cherries", oil on canvas, sold

Sunday, January 10, 2010

"Creation", oil on canvas, sold

"Orangina", oil on canvas, sold

"Emerald Afternoon", oil on canvas, sold

"Flight", oil on canvas, sold

"Grass Lady", oil on canvas, sold


"Elemental Woman", oil on canvas, private collection