
This week I took a walk that I’ve been yearning to take for more than a year.
I walked through the galleries of the Cascadia Art Museum, in Edmonds, Washington.
It was a surreal stroll, during which I came face-to-face with actual physical works of art for the first time since the pandemic slammed shut the doors of museums, music venues, and all things of gathered enjoyment. Before the pandemic I lived for museums and galleries, attending something nearly every week. Here in this tiny museum was a start on the return to whatever iteration of living comes next.
So I’m not exaggerating when I say I float-walked through the exhibit of the works of Leo Kenney (1925-2001), who, according to the panels on the wall, was one of the Northwest’s most celebrated mid-century painters. I’d never met Kenney on a wall. But, with each step further into his story I felt the joyous fluttering of wings in my belly; in my ears, the chorus of Handel’s Messiah. Hallelujah!
I’m not kidding. I heard that chorus despite there being no sound in the gallery but the wordless whispering of a docent and a tall man in the corner. The music in my ears was the sound of clouds lifting, life resuming.
For me, art and life are synonymous. Entering that museum was like stepping into a river, a current of public, poetic, intricate, open life, flowing toward me. Hallelujah! I looked around at the other museum visitors and wondered if they too were hearing Handel underneath their calm, intent faces.
Of all the public and private art, music, and gathering spaces I’ve been dying to return to, it was a fluke that I found myself at the Cascadia first. But when my friend Chris made the invitation, I jumped at it. I hadn’t seen Chris in months, and I was thrilled that Cascadia, which is relatively young in museum years and dedicated completely to the works of Northwest artists, hadn’t been permanently shuttered by lockdown.
I had no idea what was showing in the museum’s galleries.
But if I know anything it is that the universe or fate or God or The Force leads us just where we should go, especially when we don’t know where we’re going. One of the benefits of this traveling blind is the surprise when you get there. Which is why I was so wowed by Kenney’s work. For me, the artist’s evolution from surreal to ethereal was a stunning embodiment of my and many others’ experience of the last 14 months.

At the start of the exhibit I found myself immediately drawn into body-bending, time-warping abstracts. The first was a blood red suggestion of a torso, limbless and positioned beneath a sun-like circle — a blazing head disconnected from its body.
This is how COVID, it’s fear and isolation, first came to me. I look back at those initial weeks and months, as the cases climbed higher every day and we all began the work of moving inward, and I see my heart burning with fear. I see my head clinging to logic but slowly detaching from it, disembodied.
The title of the piece was “Relic.” Within that single word was the truth of what this or any catastrophe is: a thing that peels away old ways of living, thinking, being; that forces us to choose carefully the things we must leave behind and those we carry forward into a new world. I am in this title as I — and I hope a world of others — decide which pre-pandemic ways we leave behind, and which we take with us, relics of the past. Turns out that the full title is Relic of the Sun, which speaks the same, or possibly a more urgent, truth as far as I am concerned.
Rel·ic /ˈrelik/ noun
an object, custom, or belief that has survived from an earlier time but is now outmoded.
Moving on from Relic, I found myself in a Salvador Dali-like melty chasm of a world, bordering on reality, but somewhere underneath it. Wikipedia’s entry on Kenney said it perfectly: “He never tried to reproduce reality in his paintings, always searching instead for deeper meaning.”

In this period, the post-World War II 1940s and 50s, Kenney’s images were dark, hidden, most carried in them the oozy aftermath of fire that is common in surrealist works. Here was the color and mood that reflected my experience of the past year: gray, shadowed, twisted, unrecognizable.
Pulled away from activities and people and the travel I love, I fell into a deep and quite painful depression. Like the figures in these works, I melted over my couch and got lost in my anxiety and dread. I ticked off all the “every day” boxes on the depression diagnostic.
The paintings in this era of Kenney’s work spoke to the long months of lockdown. I saw my own loneliness and longing in their distant mountains and fish-headed people, in their curling lines and obscure shapes.

By December of last year, I was a rocky landscape, cracked and craggy, distant even from myself. Kenney’s painting Glorified One was a perfect reflection of this time. Two eyes looking out from stone, and in their pain missing completely the small glowy beings that have come to say “We see you.”
Glorify /ˈɡlôrəˌfī/ verb
acknowledge and reveal the majesty and splendor of (God) by one's actions.
Just as Kenney’s darker works started to evolve to an almost mystical lightness, so did my soul that day in January when I got my first vaccine and saw a slight glimmer of possibility of an end of the COVID tunnel. This tunnel, I realize, is an activist movement. It is nature’s determination to take back the night from humanity. It is a demand for change, I know.

The painting Offering of Seed II continued in the surreal technique, but at the same time, moved the artist and my experience away from darkness into hope. The seeds of hope in the painting were presented in a chalice; the seed of hope was presented in two needle stabs in my arm. Both the seeds in art and arm represent possibility, opportunity, a chance to move forward wiser, changed.
Seed /sēd/ noun
the cause or latent beginning of a feeling, process, or condition.
Kenney’s style continued like this, changing and morphing. His discovery of mescaline, his friend Deloris Tarzan Ament wrote, opened the artist to the mystical. Standing in front of a series of paintings focused on circles I was stunned by the detail, the intricate cross-hatching, the ethereal glow of the colors. Ament was spot on when she described these works as “radiating misty echoes like the reverberations of a gong.”
I’ve never tried anything stronger than pot or meditation to tap into higher level awareness, but I am certainly intrigued. I found in these proto-psychedelic visions mirrors of my present experience. With treatment the depression has started to move to the back. With more and more vaccines circulating, that COVID tunnel light is getting brighter and brighter.
I stood for an hour in the gallery, taking in the efforts of a brilliant artist, close enough to smell the years on the paintings. During that time, I felt my heart expand, radiate, shine, every detail of hope visible, the huge responsibility of changing the patterns that brought us this deadly virus set like a compass.

The piece that I will carry forward with me is not Relic of the Sun, but Formation IV — New Center.
As the world reopens, this work is the simple map of how we must go. Each of us is the glowing, light circle at the center of the map. Each of us must be surrounded by community. Each community must be connected to the communities around it. And so on toward a world that glows with connection and trust.
And, toward a world that radiates with the commitment to care for each other and the earth beneath us.
Formation /fôrˈmāSH(ə)n/ noun
the action of forming or process of being formed.
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