Making Art
A truly creative process is often messy and unpredictable. It follows no particular path save the one led forth by the artist’s own creative muse. To trust the muse is to create by taking risks. Sometimes the risks in painting feel great, but I am committed to listening and trusting my intuition at every step.
My studio practice has taught me much about living creatively, listening closely, and trusting circumstances when I am not in control. But this perspective has not been easily won.
I can work tirelessly on a painting and love it one day, but find fault with it the next. I sometimes paint for weeks on end in what I can only describe as a kind of wandering experience. During the process, I am in deep dialogue with my own questions. Despite the long stretches of uncertainty, I find it essential to trust the emerging and unfolding process.
To me, being an artist is an embodied expression, a response to the experience of being alive, and is unique to the way each artist is learning to be in the world. I am one who plumbs the depths of my psyche in order to know myself more completely. My art points to archetypal aspects of the intrapsychic journey through which one learns to shed, like the caterpillar, their first skin in life so to be transformed by the mysterious forces of “the truth at the center of the image you were born with”, to quote the poet, David Whyte.
Over the course of my life, I have been learning what is most important to me. Making art has become, for me, a sacred conversation with life.
I am an artist by vocation since 1998, though I live in a society that has little value for the Arts and as such have worked many jobs to pay bills. Nevertheless, I have painted consistently, and have been fortunate to show and sell my work throughout my career. I do not believe art is intended to be a commercial enterprise, but rather a soulful expression of the human experience. I do my best to have integrity in my process and create only what I deem an authentic expression.
I hold a BFA in painting and a Masters in Spiritual Formation and Leadership. More recently I have undertaken a graduate level program in the nature-based application of the Jungian concept of individuation. I am also the co-founder of an outdoor education company focused on nature connection.
