Drawing Connections
An excerpt from my monthly newsletter from June 2025…
The news this month is largely a reflection on past experiences and how they have influenced, informed and inspired my work. I’ve also included some a few current experiences and a few resources to continue to foster hope, stay informed and take action. There is a through line of compassion and care for the creatures we share the world with and for the world itself that is the heart of my purpose. It has been with me for as long as I can remember, the drum beat of early childhood days spent playing outside on the edge of housing developments, where fringes of wildness remained.
I am sending this out today on this last day of June in honor of my mother’s 80th birthday. Born Linda Ann Chancey on this day in 1945 to Florence Inez and Howard Donald Chancey in Dothan Alabama. She moved around a lot as a child due to my grandfather’s years of service in the US Air Force and as an adult due to a few marriages to military men but has lived alone by choice in North Carolina for the last 35+ years. For the last 2 years she has resided in an assisted living facility due to advancing dementia. She is the last survivor of her family, my last elder and last living connection to our family history. My mom is and will always be my biggest fan. She fully supported me in my decision to go two fine arts colleges, helped me to pay for my education and filled her last home with my artwork and pictures of my family. My youngest and I went to visit and celebrate with her early this month. We made her a traditional southern poundcake with candles and a few handmade presents as well as California grown sugar snaps and cherries. I was taken by surprise as we sat around the table eating cake together when she spontaneously expressed her hope that I would have time to make my art.
Linda Metcalf’s 80th Birthday celebration.
Sharing some of my encounters with the Monarch Butterfly…
In 2016 I visited Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz California and witnessed some of the Monarch migration. I’ve been using the photos I took there as reference for drawing them ever since. The gallery below features a few the works I created over the last several years focusing on the Monarch.
As an only child and only grandchild I spent a lot of time exploring alone outside. My people taught me to notice the sounds and sights in the surrounding landscape and to appreciate both its beauty and bounty. I spent the summers with my grandparents in northern Florida and we made several trips each summer to visit my maternal great grandmother in southern Alabama. I was maybe 4 or 5 years old when I was playing in my great grandmother’s garden watching a Monarch butterfly gracefully flutter among the Phlox and Lantana flowers. The air was hot and humid, resounding with the sounds of cicadas and the moment was filled with wonder and discovery, resonating with an underlying sensation of kinship.
Almost 20 years later on the road to graduate school in Illinois, I found myself stranded on the side of the road. It was a very hot August day so hot that the little gasoline remaining in the tank had evaporated. The year was 1993 long before personal cell phones were in everyone’s hands so I stood on the side of the road waiting and hoping for help. I began to look more closely at the space around me. Slowly I became aware that as far as the eye could see was the yellow gold of dead dry grasses. Then I noticed a small black shape in the grass and knelt down to look at it closer. It was a very sad moment as it became clear to me that it was the body of a dead monarch. I gently lifted it and held it in my hands. It was so light, fragile and lifeless. When I looked beyond my hands, I could see the grass at my feet all along the roadside in the median between the two sides of highway, and all the way across to the other side, the grass was littered with the bodies of more monarchs. I realize now this most staggering first hand experience, that we, humankind, have not been mindful of our actions, their impact on the environment and other living beings was a gift and set the course for the development of my work to this day. I took the monarch I had lifted from the grass along with me to school and drew it many times mostly as a means of integrating and memorializing the experience in my great grandmother's garden as well as the tragic scene along the Illinois roadside. It remains in a jar on a shelf in my studio.
Contemplating Loss, Drawing with Mixed Media and Collage (36”x 48”x 2”) with surrounding wall decals (60” x 72”)
photo credit: Shannon Kelli Pictures
Prayer for the Western Monarch, Mixed Media Collage (20”x 20”x 2”) with surrounding wall decals (20” x 56”)
photo credit: Shannon Kelli Pictures
Milkweed for Monarchs, Drawing with Mixed Media and Collage (36”x36”x2”) with surrounding wall decals (42” x 96”)
photo credit: Shannon Kelli Pictures
