Making Art
A truly creative process is 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 that artist is learning to be in the world. I am one who has plumbed the depths of my psyche in order to know myself more completely. My art points to archetypal aspects of a seldom undertaken initiatory 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 is a sacred conversation with life.
