I think my work is about my life experiences. I painted waves when I lived at the beach. I painted the renaissance revisited series after a semester in Italy. I painted my biggest heartbreak. I became fascinated by costume and self-expression in San Francisco. Back in Montana I started painting the sky and the storms. Recently, I’ve begun painting trees because when we go backpacking the woods feel very intense. My work has been a version of feeling, seeing, internalizing and exploring through expression. It is my life trajectory in paint as an internalizing of the external.
I’m not painting the deeply personal, like my husband and kids. I’m painting the experiential. I’m painting the sensory. I aspire to the condition of music and poetry, of a feeling. I like to compose. Even when I work from photos I edit moments to find the note that hits the highest vibration. I select from hundreds of images of the same storm and then I tweak and alter as needed. One storm I’m painting is half of one moment and half of another stitched together to create the most harmonious image. One image has another super imposed upon it so the sensation of walking amongst the branches can feel as heavy and dense as the moment did rather than as literal as the photos I took. I work intuitively. I feel the work. I fuss and tweak and listen to the work. As more and more time distances me from grad school, I’m getting better and better and listening to myself or listening to the art, rather than persistent voices of my professors. I get ideas for some paintings out of the blue. The skies come out of the literal blue. Some pass by and some insist on fruition. I feel the most successful paintings picked me to paint them. They came and sat in my mind until I extracted them onto canvas. I can’t paint as many paintings as I have in my mind so I have to feel around for the ones that are pressing against my skull. Once painted I can have a bit more room to feel around for the next one. My experience right now is one of trust. I’m trusting my intuition. I find that it is stressful to be bound by a concept in my art. That feels very academic and linear. Art should be able to stretch into the organic and unnamed. Ironically my work is very literal in content. Realism is very literal. Yet the things I like to paint realistically become abstract dances of color and form. I spend most of my time seeing the soft and hard edges of blues, greens and grays in vapor. I spend weeks at a time lost in the intricacies of a single moment in time in the evolution of a storm. The moment in time creates an open-ended story. Humans tell stories. According to Yuval Noah Harari it is what differentiates us from other animals.
The work becomes the combination of the aesthetic and narrative. I play with visual tone and timbre while weaving together an image that lets the viewer compose a narrative around the moment. This ties together the subjects. The figurative and the environmental are both singular moments, open ended, literal in their subject and abstract in detail. Folds of fabric are deliciously sumptuous in the reflection of light and unexpected dissolution and creation of form, just as clouds are. Zoom out and the story is one second from moving on. The figure in the painting walks off, the storm passes over and beyond the mountains. Experiencing a moment feels magical and untenable. The arts help us hold on. My art is about seeing and connecting. It is about noticing and hopefully, caring.