Statement
For over three decades, I've approached painting as a form of spiritual inquiry—a practice of sustained attention that transforms how I see and what I understand about the world around me.
The title of this exhibition, "Seeking Spirit in the World," reflects both a journey and a discovery. I seek spirit not by turning away from the physical world but by looking more deeply into it. Through decades of meditation practice, I've learned that pure, undivided attention reveals the sacred hidden within the ordinary. A water lily becomes a portal. Spring's arrival becomes an explosion. The rhythm of breath becomes visible as energy, light, and consciousness itself.
The paintings gathered here represent recent explorations of nature as teacher and revealer. Some, like "Where Water Remembers" and "Gossamer Wings," emerged from fifteen years of photographing streams—watching how light transforms underwater botanical forms, how memory lives in patterns, how attention itself shapes what we see. Others, like "Pentecost" and "Fire and Bloom," examine more intense forces: fire as a transformer, spring as an explosion, the creative destruction that makes new growth possible.
My technical process mirrors my spiritual practice. Each painting builds through layers—oil glazing over acrylic underpainting—creating depth that can only come from time and patience. I burnish, score, sand back, and build up again. The paintings reveal themselves gradually, often surprising me with forms I didn't plan. This surrendering of control, this willingness to be in conversation with the work rather than dominating it, has taught me as much about trust and release as any meditation.
The exhibition also includes "Music Fills the Sky," which explores synesthesia—how one sense translates into another, how color can become sound, how the boundaries we assume between things prove more permeable than we imagine. This permeability—between the physical and the spiritual, between observation and transcendence, between self and world—is what I'm ultimately investigating.
Simone Weil wrote that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." These paintings are both the practice and the result of that kind of attention. They present an invitation to slow down, look deeper, and stay longer. They ask you to bring your own attention to bear, to seek spirit in what you see, to discover what reveals itself when you truly pay attention.
The world is saturated with meaning and beauty, but we have to stop long enough to see it. These paintings are records of my stopping, my looking, my seeking. They're also invitations for you to do the same.
RitaMarie Cimini
Delaware, 2026