Deborah Read Studio

We had the best time last night! CoCo, as always, delivered.

With absolutely no idea where the evening would lead, we stapled giant sheets of rosin paper to the walls, fully expecting to begin making new marks like we did last year.

But CoCo had other plans.

Instead, we pulled down last year’s scrolls, cut them into pieces, and started pinning the fragments back onto the walls. Slowly, a strange and wonderful forest of CoCo Beasts began to emerge.

That’s the thing about CoCo Haze. It never arrives with a plan. It follows curiosity, collaboration, and whatever wants to happen next.

Come watch the installation evolve every Thursday in July during Culture Splash at Gallery RAG. Who knows what CoCo will do next?

InstallationArt CollaborativeArt GloucesterMA

Me On 10 Pound
34 × 36 in.
Mixed media on canvas
2026
Created during my Goetemann Artist Residency, Gloucester, MA
$1,900

This painting began on the rocks of Ten Pound Island, where land, sea, weather, and body became collaborators.

I rarely set out to make an image of a place. Instead, I try to enter into relationship with it. Wind shifts the line. Saltwater stains the canvas. Gravity, tide, memory, and chance all leave their marks. The work becomes less a picture than a record of attention.

The title Me On 10 Pound is intentionally ambiguous. It isn’t a self-portrait in the traditional sense. It asks whether the self is separate from the place at all. After enough time listening, painting, and simply being there, the boundary between observer and landscape begins to dissolve.

This work is part of an ongoing exploration of abstraction, plein air painting, and Buddhist practice—painting not to capture the world, but to meet it.

“To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” — Dōgen

MixedMedia GloucesterMA RockyNeck ArtAsPractice BuddhistArt ProcessPainting ArtAsRelation NotKnowingIsMostIntimate

Writing on a piece of mine at the current exhibition. From my thesis “The Red Thread”
“I am interested in how to love the whole world and how to save my life. I don’t really know how to do either. I know I can’t love the whole world seeing as it contains all sorts of horrors
and suffering,
I am not blind. Pressing questions I am always trying to resolve are how to be adecent mother, a ‘good’ person, be of benefit, and not harm the world. How does one do that as an artist? What are the ethics of being an artist, or making objects. Especially during the time we live in - ecological disaster, pandemics, overconsumption, too much trash, too many people,
too little time, just too much! We are killing the planet and ourselves with all of our stuff. How
can I be of benefit? I make stuff - why? Do we need more stuff in the world? We certainly do
not! And yet, the world is always making new stuff, but it recycles, it doesn’t waste anything. It
does not throw away the ‘past’ used material, the dead bodies. Is death really a thing? Water
never dies, elements never die, they just go round and round. You can’t take anything out of the
universe and you can’t put anything into it. So I like this idea of recycling, being ecological in
my art making. The idea of transformation, and being reborn, reused. Taking ‘dead’ things or
maybe old ideas and using them for what is needed now, bringing them back to life. Not as they
were back then, they died for a reason, but let’s not throw them out! If my art is going to mean
anything and not just be a waste of materials and my life, it must be ecological and recycle the
past and materials and maybe myself, my body, my environment.”