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Views from the Deep World

Announcement card, Views from the Deep World Exhibit, BCC 2017

Views from the Deep World was exhibited at the Koussevitzsky Gallery at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, MA, March 13 through April 6, 2017. Also a look at my deeper past, it featured work from the 1980s and 1990s.


Deep World BCC Tulip wall by Rosemary Starace
The Annunciation, Angela’s Resurrection Portrait, 2 Kinds of Praying


BCC Deep World, Interior Geometry Wall
Come Into Animal Presence 1 & 2, with The Soul’s Instructions in the middle


BCC Deep World show, 2 Kinds & Horses wall
2 Kinds of Praying with Mare & Foal


BCC Deep World show, long view 1
Long view of gallery


BCC Deep World show, long view 3
Long view of gallery, with Feeling Permeates the Structure of the Universe at far end, Easter Egg Hunt to its right


BCC Deep World, 4 Familiars w pedestal
Four Familiars


BCC Deep World, Euclid's Dwelling & Feeling Permeates the Strucutre of the Universe
Euclid’s Dwelling with Feeling Permeates the Structure of the Universe

Statement on Views from the Deep World
A view is defined as “an instance of beholding.” The deep world is the place of meaningful mystery that all of us draw from in our dreams, art, feelings of love and strong emotion in general, childhood memories, and other human experience. These paintings and drawings are the result of my forays in that terrain, an album of views not unlike the photos in a travelogue. This particular set of images dates from 1980 through the mid-nineties, earlier work that established my direction and proclivities, and which remains foundational.
Mare and Foal and Four Familiars came from a dream in which I was told that the horse was “the vehicle of memory,” so I got on and rode back to the beginning. The house shape and the tulips were asking me to deepen images favored by my five-year-old self, to find out more about their hold on me. In Annunciation, a big X in the sky calls forth a tulip. In Angela’s Portrait, my mother visits, restored after death. The scribbles, circles, egg shapes, and enclosures that return again and again, keep their secrets—generative marks and spaces that remind me of both possibility and the limits of knowing. The deep world is tantalizing and quicksilver, as per The Soul’s Instructions.
And Feeling Permeates the Structure of the Universe offers a blueprint of the deep world’s territory. My father, a coach and athlete and not a maker of art, interpreted this painting as a baseball diamond, with home plate at the center. My own view of this piece was so enlarged by his particular, personal meaning, a response that would not have occurred to me. I have been most pleased to carry it with me all these years.
—Rosemary Starace, March 2017

Rosemary Starace w Mare & Foal, BCC Deep World show, photo by JoAnne Spies
photo of RS by JoAnne Spies