July 4, 2022 — Celebrate Independence Day with Nude Awakenings, an exhibit featuring paintings by Jada Griffin, opening this week in Peñasco, NM on the High Road to Taos

Monday Morning Magic, July 4, 2022 — Happy Independence Day! The Inkandescent® team invites you to celebrate this important American holiday with a look at artwork by Santa Fe artist Jada Griffin of Avant-Garde Art, whom we are proud to have featured in Inkandescent Women magazine.

Jada explains: “We sculpt with clay to feel between our fingers the raw material of the earth from which we are originated. Writing is a quest to make sense of the world and to understand our place in it. We dance to experience the ecstasy of being alive. Art helps us to know there is beauty in a commodity-driven existence, to touch the freedom of a geography without borders and a landscape without maps. It is a way of life.”

Nude Awakenings: In honor of the magic created by women everywhere, today we shine a spotlight on a group exhibition entitled Nude Awakenings, which features artwork by Jada. The exhibition is at Gaucho Blue Fine Art Gallery in Peñasco on the High Road to Taos, NM. It runs from July 9 to August 7.

Artist Jada Griffin in Santa Fe, NM

Elemental Woman: “While my paintings of women intellectually always support female empowerment, they come from a forbidden oasis,” explains Jada of her painting, pictured at right. “These paintings are equally mine and not mine, for they surface in spite of myself from a lake that is both inside of and also detached from me, and whose submerged world is accessed each time from a different location — a grassy channel, a fork in the road less traveled, a bumpy old-west wagon trail along the Turquoise Highway. During the act of painting, I inhabit an energy region of fluctuating boundaries where visions flow and overlap, unbridled and free, a drug I have never taken and a love I have yet to make.”

We leave you with this parting thought from one of Jada’s heroines, fellow New Mexico artist Georgia O’Keeffe: “It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve.”

Until next Monday: May your week be filled with the courage to live your convictions, and the magical feeling that independence brings. — Hope Katz Gibbs, founder, and president, Inkandescent® Inc. Inkandescent.us

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