One of my first memories...

Sitting on the concrete stoop, warmed by the long morning summer sun, I relished in the glow on my skin as I watched my mother preparing the days’ lunch. I giggled, while Peaches, the family dog slobbering my cheek, as I awaited the daily routine.

Mom finished her tasks, as I wiped the kisses from my face, and finally, the fun was about to commence. She emerged with an old paint brush and metal pail half full of water. She gently sat it in front of me, kissed the top of my head, and left me with a smile. A grin from ear to ear emerged on my face. I gleefully took hold of the brush, dipped it in the water, and slapped it gingerly against the ground. The mark left an unwavering stroke of dark grey, the contrast mesmerized me. Swooshes and dabs littered the baking concrete canvas. Over and over, from pail to cement, I kept painting, chasing the strokes as they evaporated from the heat. I sat there all morning till the sun drove me away. I was four,..

I found myself chasing those fleeting marks, forging a love that resides in the deepest parts of me.

Throughout the years, this passion willfully endures, finding me untethered at times, struggling to keep up with the demands of life. During times of both thick and thin, I seem to find myself always dreaming about painting. The euphoria of getting down to work, brushes wet with oils dancing across a canvas like a rainstorm over a lake. Different motifs inspire me, and my mind's eye is set ablaze with colors.

It was in earning my Bachelors that I found how to channel my creative energies... how to weave the act of mark making, with my emotions. Somewhere between the two, I’ve pushed myself to understand color theory and harmony, and their correlation to expression. It is a lifelong pursuit, wrought with trial and tribulations, but it is the path I was born to explore.

 Throughout art history’s lineage, expression and understanding have been breaking down boundaries over the centuries, forming a multitude of movements. Many evolved over the past 150 years. Artists strive to create the new, finding relevancy and new syntaxes for a means of expression. I find myself continually struggling to understand my place in it all. My intentions are not to reinvent the wheel or copy masters of old, but to fashion an interpretation of my emotions through the natural setting.

My hope is in capturing the viewer, even if just for a moment. And in that space, I seek a conversation, a place that resonates an openness to imagination. Through color, texture, and mark making, I strive to expose a playground between those realms, reality and imagination. The landscape prevails as my starting point. I use the natural setting as the first sentence in the discussion, a reality all can relate to. It’s the tangible world that cements the expression of my visual abstractions, discerning the creation in its entirety.

- Written for the Alchemy Artisan Journal | Vol. 1