Lunar passage

Grace DeGennaro on how she made the "Rose Moon" series on view in her exhibition "Continuum" at Zero Station in Portland.

Grace DeGennaro, detail from the “Rose Moon 1.” Watercolor on Somerset paper, 26”16”, 2016. Photo by Luc Demers, courtesy Grace DeGennaro.

Good day, it’s the vernal equinox, the astronomical beginning of spring. Day and night are equally long; the earth’s axis is neither tilted toward nor away from the sun. On this day of balance, symmetry, and beginnings, it seems right to turn things over to painter Grace DeGennaro.

I’ve been following Grace’s sacred geometries for 20 years, entranced by her hand-painted symmetrical patterns and sumptuous palette. There’s something oracular about her paintings, but maybe that’s the nature of all things sacred: They take us into a realm that is at once beyond and within ourselves, a realm where time dissolves and present, past, and future become one. It’s a place that can be hard to find.

But there are maps – Grace uses mathematical proportions and Josef Albers’s color theory. Then there are rituals, and dreams. Who knows, maybe the equinox is a portal to that realm, or, in the case of the series Grace writes about here, the solstice. Her paintings are themselves maps. Let yourself surrender to them, and see where they lead.

Grace’s show “Continuum,” at Portland’s Zero Station Gallery through April 27, is part of an ongoing series in which she stipples the surface of oil paintings with cold wax beads. Here, she shares the process behind a sequential installation of watercolor drawings, “Rose Moon,” in which she uses opaque watercolor instead of wax.. Grace refers to them as “strands of sacred beads that provide aid in prayer as fingers move along to count each invocation.”

Grace writes:

Photo courtesy Grace DeGennaro.

During an evening walk on the summer solstice to see the Rose Moon rising over the coast of Maine, I was struck by the shifting color of the moon and the darkening sky.