Loving, intelligent, creative, intuitive, courageous community,
Here I bring you the second edition of this first-quarter-moon newsletter: What Lies At the Center? With the aim of bringing a breath of fresh air and space at these moments of the month- I invite a guest to the space of Heart Marrow, conducting a micro-interview with one who has brought me personal awareness and connection. I hope these interviews bring you a morsel of reflection, engagement, and centering during these transformative and unsettling times.
For this second edition, I feel a softening; an ancient, resourceful, elemental presence. I have known Danila Rumold for a short year and some. Yet, Danila is one of those with whom I feel a spiritual bond. Danila, her art, and her personal journey are models of strength and stewardship. Her dedication to the mother, and the earth mother, in relationship to art-making, continues to inspire me to hold clarity and wisdom in my practices.
You can learn more about Danila, her offerings, and her artwork HERE.
Please scroll down to receive her artwork and written contribution.
Enjoy.
I am an American-German-Colombian artist with parents who were first-generation immigrants. I grew up between my American-born culture and those of my parents. Coming of age, our story evolved into the Gen X’ers, the middle child who had the quintessential feeling of being lost and filled with anxiety. At a young age I found solace in making, and art became a way of life.
In undergraduate school, at DePaul University, I was trained in mural painting techniques. After graduation I was employed with the Chicago Artist Coalition, where I worked on several projects. The experience of mural painting shaped my future work, in that large scale-painting and its engagement with the physicality of the body has remained important.
After graduating in 1997, I spent three months living with family in Uruguay, South America. I spent every day making art with my Aunt who had a studio in her backyard. I also worked in a collective artist studio that included discussions of art. It was through this experience that my love for Pre-Columbian art came to fruition.
In 1998 I went on to pursue my Master's which I received at the University of Washington in Seattle. That program turned my concept of art upside down. I began to empty the narrative and embrace abstraction. The change was organic and occurred concurrently with my inquiry into Eastern Philosophy.
In 2013 I became a mother and in 2015, a parent of two. In order to maintain my practice, we moved near my parents who lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Raising two young children and living in the high desert profoundly shifted my practice to embrace non-toxic materials - as a way of creating connection and harmony with people and our planet.
Danila Rumold: What lies at the center for you?
The Buddha sits right at the center of the mandala of the five Buddha families. The buddha families present us with a complete picture of both the sacred world of enlightened mind and the neurotic world of ego-centered existence.
Using natural minerals and materials from the earth, the Buddha is made up of mica, mulberry paper and ultramarine blue pigment. Interpenetrating nature's materiality with our materiality, I explore themes of living and dying; hope and fear; strength and fragility, and form and formlessness.
Living with terminal illness, and faced with the feeling that everything is out of control, I seek to embrace the groundlessness - the feeling of no solid ground under our feet. Some might call it impermanence, which is a basic fact of life that we very often don’t want to accept. We don’t like groundlessness. We want the solid ground. But if we can relax into it, then from this place we can open to love.
Love is what lies at the center.
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