It can seem counterintuitive not to do something just because you do it well. When I stood in front of the paintings in my undergraduate thesis exhibition I realized that there is purpose beyond the slick hyper realism rendering of reality. Because I was so eager to deliver a specific message, and achieve a predetermined measure of perfection, I had masked most of myself in the artwork by focusing narrowly on what it was supposed to mean, and supposed to look like.

 

 

As contemporary humans, and artists, we are susceptible to conditioning. Being so preoccupied with the desired outcome – our concrete definition of success – only serves to distract from the pleasures of expression. We are smart, but are we too smart? This indication of our advancement as species is the very thing that can take ahold of our creativity and marginalize its relevance. Without making room for the things that don’t pertain to the standards we have set, we miss the potential to unleash the best part of ourselves.

“At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of the weakness – I reenter though the breach – and I reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again.” – Henri Matisse

Although the modern equation in which we live suggests otherwise, truly embracing the essence of who we are does not rely on our ability to accomplish but in embracing the resulting flaws of our efforts. Because our true nature is not to fulfill a preconceived notion of how things should be; our flaws are what make us absolutely unarguably different from every other single person.

Our flaws give us identity.

 

I can’t say that I know what I’m doing, which has always been the most exciting way to get things done. At least in my experience of artwork. I wouldn’t say that I am a technically advanced painter, but I can sure catch a certain momentum and ride it like the wind. Sometimes things turn out in my favor, the ending arrives with a flourish or a slow sifting out of all the ideas that have spontaneously cropped up. Sometimes I let go at just the right moment.

Most of the time I go too far and the magic that I harnessed on paper, canvas, in my memory, gets lost, burnt up in the process, destroyed by an emotional reaction. A handful of the art on here is merely a glimpse of pieces that eventually met their demise at the hand of their creator. I am still learning when to jump off  on the right beat, and figuring out how to pay better attention to when an idea has arrived, danced the tango, and then departed, leaving a somewhat mystical visual trace. For me creating art is more about being in touch with this inexplicable force and honoring the fact that it exists, and less to do with convention or expertise. I think that this very fact is why I can call myself an artist and not just feel like it’s pretend.

 

 

This piece is a multi media collage I titled Rapunzel because it is literally the woman in the tower letting her hair be climbed by a man. There is a lot of say about this as a metaphor for me as a young woman having let a man climb her hair back in 2006…but that isn’t as important as the other kind of woman this is: the raptured one, looking to the sky with a dagger of geese flying into a sunset piercing her heart.