Last Saturday, I bundled up, excited for the stories I would experience within the framed and unframed works in Boothbay Region Art Foundation's annual "Wintering" exhibition. 

Kharris Bill’s “Wintry View” brings us inside looking out a window one evening. Abstract bare trees of black stand in a depth of snow, wild and windy flakes of white swirls and squiggles among them. A delightful, free and whimsical scene. Caroline Clare Davis’ “Winter Trees” painting of a forest scene could be a still from a Disney fairytale film like “Snow White,” or an illustration of some other land bound between two covers. The colors – pinks, purples, greens, blues, trees, both living and dead, some snow-covered, some icy and fragile. There are hints of how large this forest is in the background, in shadow, beyond a clearing. I went back into this one several times. The colors and treatment of the scene are unexpected.

Susannah Crolius’ “Winter’s Bone” found objects altar, truly steals the show, for me, anyway. I spoke with Susannah about the altar and her background. She was a UCC pastor for 25 years in Massachusetts. She left the ministry eight years ago and moved to Damariscotta.

“I began a quest of how to reconnect with my soul, my body, my stories, the things that mattered to me,” she said. "At an antique show I bought a box of empty old clock cases. I bought them not knowing what I was going to do with them. I was just making this transition from my former professional role in life to listening to what was going on within me.”

I found this interesting because, tick-tock, she had spent 25 years working 70 hours a week. Seemed perfect and ironic. These clock cases, particularly the ones with the steeples or points on either side, seemed reverential and contained a sort of sacredness, she said.

Susannah chose one of these for the altar in the show, the one made to honor the life of an owl who tragically flew into her windshield while Susannah driving. “I was really traumatized. Taking a life is not something that you just sort of let go by, at least I don't. And it really requires some spiritual reflection, I think, and some pause."

The prose she selected for the altar is an excerpt from Mary Oliver’s “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field." “... so I thought: maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers... and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light — in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.”

I read and reread those lines. I went into the altar: Pieces of paper are scattered below the prose, some appearing burnt; two white feathers, the small, white tree branch, birch I thought because of its symbolizing new beginnings and the path between life and death. The smallish opening on the altar back resembling the waning moon suggests, simply because it is the moon, the death of the owl, like the death of all things, isn’t the end. Its spirit, like the cycles of the moon, goes on. And on.

Susannah says she doesn’t really make these altars, she’s just sort of the middle person. “Something will inspire me: It might be a quote, a color, an object, or, it might be a box. I sit and talk with them and they tell me what story they want to tell. And I felt like I had really honored that owl, and now I can hear, see an owl and not feel so, sad.”

The back of the owl’s altar is is painted blackish blue, and the opening, the moon, from the front, rising from it is the color white, the wings of the owl, its spirit in flight, on its way home.

“Wintering” runs through March 8. BRAF is at 1 Townsend Ave., downtown Boothbay Harbor. Gallery hours are Thursday - Saturday: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sunday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.