This cerulean blue, cobalt blue, white, and gold painting is titled Eighth. A number of the many hand-painted circles in the canvas have been gilded so that they glint in and out of view as you move around the painting. Watching this change happen in the painting is for me something like the awe that I feel when watching the sky change late in the afternoon. In moments like those, I find myself identifying with the bewildered creatures in Rilke’s Eighth Elegy – navigating between terror and wonder. This is a pair of feelings I experience while working on this painting as well, which takes its title from the famous poem.
And how bewildered is any womb-born creature
— Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy”, Duino Elegies (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing
from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way
a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat
quivers across the porcelain of evening.
This painting was featured at the 2014 Mennonite Arts Weekend and as part of the 2016 Enchanted Forest display at Bergdorf Goodman in New York.
In 2024 this painting was reworked to build an even more dramatic sense of light and to tighten the color harmony between its deep cerulean blues and the yellow pigment used alongside its touches of gold.
