In their new book, Vision & Verse from Virginia’s Countryside, artist Ruthie Windsor-Mann and poet Elizabeth Keeler capture the beauty and spirituality of the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Both poet and painter live and work in Little Washington, about 70 miles west of Washington DC, a rural farming region rich in natural beauty and history. “Landscape and weather are my inspiration,” says Windsor-Mann, who has been a painter most of her life and now works in a little studio surrounded by 12 acres of hay fields, a few minutes walk from her house.
In incredibly vivid paintings, Windsor-Mann captures the deep radiance of rising and setting suns. Her compositions are rarely clearly defined solid forms. Using translucent and opaque pigments, she creates the effect of sun, shade, clouds, even rain. In her oil painting Red Sky in Morning, we see the sun breaking through, about to illuminate both earth and sky.
Windsor-Mann’s paintings are quintessential plein air —they could not have been created solely in a studio. This talented and enthusiastic painter is not one to pass up an opportunity to paint something she finds miraculous. In fact, she outfitted her car with easel, canvases and painterly paraphernalia so she could stop any time, any place, set up her easel and perhaps sketch old slave cabins, butterflies, a creek in late fall, or driving west on 211— all became wondrous landscape paintings that reveal the special beauty that can be found in rural Virginia.
Ruthie Windsor-Mann’s vision is rooted in the moment––what she sees is reflected in her paintings, sketches and watercolors. Elizabeth Keeler’s poems reveal a world of dreams, innocence, hopefulness and meditations on spirituality and love. Keeler, an Episcopal priest, is a collaborator, not an interpreter of Windsor-Mann’s work.
“When Ruthie started to show me her work, I began thinking of poems” says Keeler adding that “I didn’t look at a painting of bird nests or foxes, for example, and then write a poem about them.”
Keeler is much more contemplative. “I write from my experience. Ruthie encouraged me to write about what inspires me. I see an egg, for example, as something ineffable. After all, God speaks to us through creation.” One of Keeler’s most alluring poems: about an egg, is entitled Masterpiece and it says it all: “Could any human hand ever create such a delicate masterpiece?”
The beauty of this rare book of poetry and paintings is that the artist captures her own personal reality, while the poet reaches for the immaterial and the sublime. G&S
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