The winner of our Summer Art Contest is Cricket Desmarais with “On the Blue Shores of Silence,” inspired by On the Blue Shores of Silence by Pablo Neruda. I caught up with Cricket after her Friday morning yoga class in the Sanger Galley at The Studios of Key West and asked her about her prize-winning art.

Q: Tell me a little about yourself as an artist?

A: It’s hard for me to talk about myself as an artist. I just know that I feel most alive and right inside when I’m actively engaged in some form of art making—painting, writing, choreographing & dancing, taking photos, or performing. I love it all, and would make art all day, every day, if I could.

On that note, having a studio at The Studios of Key West has been somewhat of a game changer for me, not only as a beautiful space in which to work, but the mental space and “permission” to make my own work matter, too. Powerful medicine.

Q: Tell me about the process for this painting?

A: Right now, I’m mostly working with encaustics—an ancient art form that uses beeswax, damar resin, oil pigments, & heat—which I’ve also been teaching for a few years at The Studios. I am in love with the hypnotic quality of it all. It forces me to slow down while also finding a balance between pushing myself to a new place & process & knowing when to stop. It’s not a medium that you can be super controlling with, which can be pretty frustrating at times. I often have a very particular idea but have to allow for it to go in the direction it seems to be going in for it to work, even if it’s not what I had in mind. A very different process to the writing work I do for clients at my desk, which is all about precision, facts, strategy, and deadlines.

Q: How did you come to pick your inspiration book? Is it something you have loved and reread, did it just strike you? Is it a literal image from the book or an interpretation?

A: On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea is a beautiful book put out by Harper Collins in 2003 that celebrates what would have been the 100th birthday of one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda. It collects 12 of his ocean poems translated by Alastair Reid and paired with abstract paintings by Mary Heebner. There are so many incredible lines in it that fully transport me to that salty, watery world I love and that dreamspace world between worlds within us that Neruda is so skilled at naming without compromising its intangible quality. He speaks to me at a very cellular level, and his ocean poems even more so.

I can’t say that my piece is derived from any specific line or poem in the book, but it is definitely born from a desire to express my own defined interpretation of the poems, which is very different than Heebner’s. The floating figure in my piece is of my younger daughter, whose neuro-challenges all but disappear when in the ocean. I wanted to create a sense of peace and being held, but the direction it took also invoked a bit of anxiety in me. At times she seemed to be floating alone in the middle of the ocean, and the blue pigment kept melting under the image and blurring into her skin tone. In hindsight, I think my process with it reflects a sort of acknowledgment of the ocean’s power and indifference to us, and the concern I hold for my child. It was a hard piece to call finished. (I often feel that way with most of my visual art work).

~ Robin Wood, Associate Manager