Britt Block Artist Statement                   

I am making paintings about bees - their power, their centrality, their beauty… but I am not always showing you the bee.

Instead, I am asking you to look at the landscape - the world - as a bee might see it:  glints of light, the magnetism at the center of things, the underlying radiance.   

I am asking you to look at an apple blossom with the scale and drama of a bee's vision.  I am asking you to consider the relationship between a bee's industry and the production of nectars and the bounty of the harvest.

In appreciating a bee, we are appreciating the endless and repetitive toil that brings food to the table.  We are appreciating the interconnectedness of wild things and the human world.  We are appreciating the bounty and beauty of the world.

This creature carries the entire ecological biosphere on its tiny wings.  Each of us do as well.  We are not only "individuals", we are part of our hive.   This is why it is beneficial to pay attention to the tiny things - tiny details such as apple blossoms and bees - as they are deep mirrors of the whole.  We are invited, through our consideration of bees, to consider how our work contributes to our hive.  How what we do is part of the web of all things.   Where is our attention - at the radiant center?  Does our effort nurture the whole?  Is our industry producing nectar?

When we take the perspective of a bee, we are stepping inside a central truth of agriculture - a place that unites fact and metaphor - to arrive at a deeper understanding. 

As a lifelong artist and meditator, for me, painting is about showing up inside my experience day after day, saying yes to everything, being present with all of it, true to all of it, witnessing the river flowing through me and witnessing myself as the river, and the flow of change.  This dynamic flow of my life in painting has moved through landscapes in the West, where my paintings have been seen in galleries from Taos, New Mexico to Palm Springs and beyond.  Currently, my paintings are in local galleries in Portland and in the agricultural valley of Yamhill County, Oregon.