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Artist's Statement
My work is Close to the Bone, far from the public/political. It deals with my internal thoughts, emotions, and psychological processes. That said, I often wonder how our environment affects us: the ways the body integrates, disintegrates, and is affected by its environment. Subjectivity becomes objectivity. Judgment. I am attempting to have a conversation between the figure (myself), plants, buildings, external versus internal structures, how we/I hold myself together through dreams, imagery, and breath. I create both figurative and abstract works that are a representation of various parts of myself.
What is beauty? It is a balance of form and color, composition. Beauty is a part of my process of creating—if I can’t find or identify the beauty in it, I find it difficult to continue. Painting is putting/placing/orienting images in the context of a square, the edges/boundaries of a window into my psyche. What is possible in the context of myself, within my own limits? What is not possible? What do I want to show, demonstrate, express, represent?
(Awareness work). I find that when I paint my thoughts are very much the same as when I am in pure contact with another person. The painting and I begin to interact and have a dialogue with one another, we begin to influence and speak to each other, and we both leave the experience changed in some way by the effect we have on one another. Neither of us will ever be the same as we were in that moment, because that particular moment and set of circumstances and feelings can never exist in that particular form again. The painting is affected in obvious ways, whereas I am affected in more subtle ways: my thoughts become calm and fluid and I begin to let go of everything else that might be going on in my life at that moment. I begin to think about the colors I am choosing to paint with, the content of the picture, and how I am reacting from a very instinctive place to what I am seeing or to my references.
Painting can be both a representation of the conscious and unconscious processes in the psyche influencing each other; the content and the act of painting is a conscious decision, my reaction to it and how the “conversation” begins to unfold can be slightly beneath my awareness. (What is instinct? How do we “develop” instinct ala Joe Wesner who said that instinct comes from practice, from looking and experiencing? What is a gut reaction to something? What is learned and what are we born with?)
I recently had this experience when I began to paint “Fire in the Sky”. At first I was going to paint about the intersection of some old barn photos and an old self-portrait, and how I am “influenced” (how these structures support me, hold me back, divide me, make me who I am, become a part of how I identify myself, keep me from growing and help me to grow. This word could mean so many things) by the structures that surround and intersect me. Then I felt compelled to paint red in the sky. I was aware that there were wildfires happening in the area and this was part of my consciousness, but being compelled felt different, inexplicable. Were the fires influencing me? Was it the composition and other colors in the piece that were moving me? That night I had a dream about an old structure, a school, burning. My old learned patterns of thought (that were very sturdy) were slowly burning and being destroyed. The people in the dream reacted to the fire as though their lives were not at stake, and my role in the dream was to get them to wake up, to realize the danger that they were in and shake them out of their ennui. They were getting their morning coffees (waking up in their own good time?) while the structure was about to collapse on them. There was also something about regimenting them: that I needed or wanted them all to get into an orderly line as they left the building. There were others in the building that were stuck there, that I could not help. I understood that I would be unable to help all of them (or me); that some of me was going down with the old structure.
I have an ongoing interest in how we perpetuate our patterns of being. I am becoming a psychotherapist and so have been developing an understanding of how we both let ourselves go and hold ourselves back through our experiences of our histories, traumas, and learned beliefs. Our dreams, hopes and relationships become our guides to a better way of life. Through art, I continue my exploration of these intricate boundaries of the self and the other.
I came to the Bay Area to become a therapist and left my identity as an artist behind in Detroit. For the last five years I have been working to get my Master’s in psychology and then working to develop my identity as a psychotherapist. Lately I have become more aware of the identity I left behind when I left my community of friends in the Detroit art world. I began to crave that part of myself, and so have begun re-membering my artist-self.
What is beauty? It is a balance of form and color, composition. Beauty is a part of my process of creating—if I can’t find or identify the beauty in it, I find it difficult to continue. Painting is putting/placing/orienting images in the context of a square, the edges/boundaries of a window into my psyche. What is possible in the context of myself, within my own limits? What is not possible? What do I want to show, demonstrate, express, represent?
(Awareness work). I find that when I paint my thoughts are very much the same as when I am in pure contact with another person. The painting and I begin to interact and have a dialogue with one another, we begin to influence and speak to each other, and we both leave the experience changed in some way by the effect we have on one another. Neither of us will ever be the same as we were in that moment, because that particular moment and set of circumstances and feelings can never exist in that particular form again. The painting is affected in obvious ways, whereas I am affected in more subtle ways: my thoughts become calm and fluid and I begin to let go of everything else that might be going on in my life at that moment. I begin to think about the colors I am choosing to paint with, the content of the picture, and how I am reacting from a very instinctive place to what I am seeing or to my references.
Painting can be both a representation of the conscious and unconscious processes in the psyche influencing each other; the content and the act of painting is a conscious decision, my reaction to it and how the “conversation” begins to unfold can be slightly beneath my awareness. (What is instinct? How do we “develop” instinct ala Joe Wesner who said that instinct comes from practice, from looking and experiencing? What is a gut reaction to something? What is learned and what are we born with?)
I recently had this experience when I began to paint “Fire in the Sky”. At first I was going to paint about the intersection of some old barn photos and an old self-portrait, and how I am “influenced” (how these structures support me, hold me back, divide me, make me who I am, become a part of how I identify myself, keep me from growing and help me to grow. This word could mean so many things) by the structures that surround and intersect me. Then I felt compelled to paint red in the sky. I was aware that there were wildfires happening in the area and this was part of my consciousness, but being compelled felt different, inexplicable. Were the fires influencing me? Was it the composition and other colors in the piece that were moving me? That night I had a dream about an old structure, a school, burning. My old learned patterns of thought (that were very sturdy) were slowly burning and being destroyed. The people in the dream reacted to the fire as though their lives were not at stake, and my role in the dream was to get them to wake up, to realize the danger that they were in and shake them out of their ennui. They were getting their morning coffees (waking up in their own good time?) while the structure was about to collapse on them. There was also something about regimenting them: that I needed or wanted them all to get into an orderly line as they left the building. There were others in the building that were stuck there, that I could not help. I understood that I would be unable to help all of them (or me); that some of me was going down with the old structure.
I have an ongoing interest in how we perpetuate our patterns of being. I am becoming a psychotherapist and so have been developing an understanding of how we both let ourselves go and hold ourselves back through our experiences of our histories, traumas, and learned beliefs. Our dreams, hopes and relationships become our guides to a better way of life. Through art, I continue my exploration of these intricate boundaries of the self and the other.
I came to the Bay Area to become a therapist and left my identity as an artist behind in Detroit. For the last five years I have been working to get my Master’s in psychology and then working to develop my identity as a psychotherapist. Lately I have become more aware of the identity I left behind when I left my community of friends in the Detroit art world. I began to crave that part of myself, and so have begun re-membering my artist-self.