about
Sungold is the art of Lena Maude, singer-songwriter. Sungold came from a dream, symbologies, geometry. While first a hapless name, a chance choice at a young age, Sungold unfolded over the years to become an integral personal mythology. The alchemical symbol for gold can be that of the sun. A circle with a dot in the center. Sun and Gold are intrinsically connected in our meaning-making. “Searching for the Sun” becomes analogous to the search for gold, the holy grail, that beauty in between lines of poetry, the sweet ‘ah-ha!’, moments of natural reverence in the every day.
the artist: lena maude
I was raised in Muskegon County, Michigan, spent many years in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan and most recently have relocated to Colorado on a whim of ‘changing everything I know’.
I move a lot. I stay still a lot. I love people. I love nature. I also love herbalism and cacao. I am ever fascinated with motif, pattern, dream, mythology, meaning, both, why. How much can one feel alive? How often can one feel expansive gratitude? What is the experience of opposites, the light and dark, gift and shadow balance? Imagery comes to the mind’s eye, a version of that vision can be relayed to the physical world, and it can be shared - so here is Sungold - a geometric emergence.
background
Under the brief, fabulous tutelage of Mary Ann Beckwith I learned watercolors while working towards my BS in Mathematics at Michigan Tech Univ. Watercolors are my primary coloring tool, with gouache becoming more sprinkled into an increasingly illustrative approach.
Sketch art and doodling have been a part of my life since before I could write with the first pieces being inscribed onto blank book cover spaces and continuous form copy paper with perforated edges that one had to learn to meticulously tear off.
Live edge canvases came into the picture when hunting for house-project wood at a local Keweenaw Sawmill. There I saw some beautiful ‘scrap’ pieces that appeared to be perfect canvases. While wood can be fickle, its beauty is everlasting like that of a crystal.
I am a folk artist, in the sense that I am almost entirely self-taught.
photo creds:
Top // a wonderful woman I met around TC who entered her polaroids into Art Prize, GR
Reaching // Brockit - Adam @whiskeyandradiators