About
“The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?” Picasso
My artwork is equally about the process as it is the end result. One of my high school teachers taught the following 4 rules to everyone who walked into his classroom: Show Up, Pay Attention, Always Tell the Truth, and Never be Attached to Results. Sounds easy enough, right? HA!.... not really…. Years after hearing these rules, they resonate at a deeper, spiritual level. ART gives me a space to be completely and totally myself, in a rustling and constantly spinning world. No one else can create for me, no one can tell me what color to use or how to paint a line. By showing up in my studio, I have to pay attention to me and only me. I’m alone with my thoughts, alone with feelings. Every action, every stroke of the brush is my truth at that moment. Sometimes that alone is hard to face, hard to accept, difficult to love. Only through practice, creating piece after piece, am I able to be less attached to the end result and really connect with the process and my truth. That process is what feeds me. I lose all sense of time, I blast my music until the doors start to rattle, I dance around and fling paint around (mostly on the canvas but not always). I am completely in that moment. I forget about the weeds that need to be pulled, the baseboards that need to be cleaned and the meetings I have the next day.
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Thomas Merton
The content of my art not only focuses on the process but it also tends to be lighthearted or even a bit sarcastic at times. “The job of an artist is to offer a sanctuary of beauty to an ugly world.” Jeff Goins While I don’t always believe the world to be an ugly place, it can often feel that way. The goal of my work is to bring a smile to peoples’ faces. I want to remind them that there is beauty, there is humor, there is good. I want to offer a place for people to find themselves in my work. Can you feel the energy of the brushstrokes or do you see connect with the subtle images that are collaged in the background to tell a story? Do you relate with the bird running at full speed with it’s wings flailing?! This, to ME, is what it’s all about. Connecting with one another, sharing experiences and helping each other make it through this life with a big smile on our face (most of the time).
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