With Love to Marsden

A diptych, Kay WalkingStick painted "With Love to Marsden" when she was an artist-in-residence at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, where she was inspired by the features of the land.

The title refers to the great early American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley who also painted the U.S. southwest, as well as Mexico. The painting consists of two square canvases put side by side, showing two representations of the same place. WalkingStick uses this paired format to propose an inextricable relationship not just between abstraction and representation, but between spirit and matter; the eternal and the temporal; between what is felt and what can be seen; between the soul and the body. The left-hand canvas features an equilateral cross, a symbol WalkingStick has featured in many works because it can be read in multiple ways: such as a reference to Native American belief systems invoking the Four Directions or as a reference to the Christian cross.