art is pretty

I was talking to an artist friend of mine today, or rather, I was talking and he was listening. You should totally check out his art It is "the shit" Anyway, I was seeking his advice on the art world and my place in it and indirectly the question came up about what my concept is for the work I'm creating. I think it is a legit and important question and I definitely pondered it as I was walking outside, thinking a lot about my work and why I like to paint exactly what I paint. I wasn't always at that place of creating colorful non objective/abstract pieces...


So...I'm walking around outside thinking about my direction, my objective...and then I see it. An orange gummy bear nestled snugly in the snow, a bright orange glinting in the sunlight, stark contrast against the white. omg, I thought and I kind of giggled out loud because that felt like this defining moment to me. A gummy bear in the snow. It was so perfect, so oddly inspiring.


Why do I paint what I paint? I am blown away by color. I am enraptured by the landscape, by the natural beauty that explodes across every part of this world. I have been truly lucky to have lived in a lot of places in this country and others. My dad was in the air force and we moved a lot, especially when I was a young child. I was able to see the sun set in the red dirt of the northern territory of Australia, a memory that hangs like a painting in my mind. I have seen the dark crashing waves of the pacific ocean and made snow angels in Japan. 


When I first picked up the paintbrush I was drawn to landscape, it felt right. I liked to paint with photographs as reference and sometimes I just enjoyed making up an environment I saw in my mind. The images were pretty and calming, a perfect moment frozen forever...but there was definitely something missing. I realized what that was when I started to actually let go. The landscape was bubbling out of me and turning into something different that sparked a new type of passion within me. One of the first things I painted that encapsulated the idea of a particular landscape and my emotion surrounding it was this:

I called this "Florida" and the sand looking parts were made up of actual sand I picked up on a Florida beach. I mixed the sand with some gel medium and spread it out with a plastic fork; I felt so liberated! 


At the same time there was such stiffness in the solid shapes, an isolated array of "islands" This was my next try:

I didn't use a paintbrush at all. I didn't even paint it on stretched canvas so I was able to pick up the entire piece and move it around. This is painting? Yes it is! I can pinpoint this as the start of my journey into the exploration of the array of colors of the natural world, how these organic motions mimic and reflect so many different elements in nature, in humans and the emotions that tie into my observation of the world around me. I realized painting could be a process that evoked a feeling, a movement of color that evolves as it settles until it is another snapshot of a beautiful moment in time, frozen.


This past spring I was walking around on my lunch break and saw a butterfly, the beautiful yellow and black monarch type, broken and splayed out on the ground. I immediately decided to paint some butterflies into my abstract spaces, an actual representation of the natural world juxtaposed against an emotive sense of space...it felt connected and comfortable there, as much as it did without the butterfly in these calm yet vibrant places of movement. If you want to look at these paintings you can see them here.

So am I the gummy bear in the snow? Inappropriately placed but makes you feel good? Or a colorful splash of life in the quiet...