I’ve been thinking about my tendency to try to convince myself that I shouldn’t be nervous about a situation. I want to own my feelings and let myself experience whatever I need to experience so why block myself from important emotions? Well, experimenting is an important part of my art practice and as someone who is usually nervous about and overthinking on all the things, this idea of embracing all the feelings (especially the hard ones) has finally made its way into other areas of my life. What a concept! The freedom!
This tendency to block feelings is a sort of magical thinking that takes us out of reality and into some alternate, parallel universe and why is that better than being in reality and trying to process things as they are and not how we want to pretend them to be? I’m not talking about any one thing in particular because that list can be endless depending on my mood or the newscycle. But, since I’m an Artist, and just because of the way my brain works and my interest in dualities, I often thrive in that abstract thought process of imagined realities and it is the very foundation on which much of my art practice is built.
When my kids or friends come to me with a problem, my instinct would often be to tell them “don’t be nervous!” but recently I’ve been stopping myself and shifting that conversation to ask… “what are you nervous about?” or “did something happen?” or the simple yet effective, “let’s talk about it” or, my personal favorite, “what’s the worst thing that can happen?” I can say these things to them because I’ve practiced saying it to myself so many times both for my mental health and for my art practice. Embracing the feeling of being nervous and all the abstract possibilities, has become an intuitive exercise that has helped not only my mind but my art. It’s the ultimate flex to say “these are my feelings and I’m going to work through them” because all feelings matter and they have a sneaky way of turning up when you least expect them to anyway.
How does this play out in my studio? Well, my work has always been anchored in drawing. Even before I took up photography, as a teenager I studied drawing and oil painting and my teacher would often have us focus on the negative space around whatever subject we were observing. It didn’t matter if it was a figure, a still life, a piece of fruit, or even a copy of a photograph, it wasn’t just the physical subject that was important but the space around it. This exercise of teaching my eye to travel around a scene became essential to my work as someone who loves to draw and as a photographer. Eventually, I became more interested in the negative space and all the possibilities that could happen in the area around a subject. This helped me to really develop a strong sense of structure, line and space. Magical thinking!
In 2015, when I picked up painting again for the first time in 20 years and started to move a little away from my obsessive need to take photos and capture the real world around me, I began to organically develop an abstract language rooted in negative space with the constant observation of space, line and structure. This idea of owning the entirety of a situation, all the feelings if you will, was a tiny seed that was planted and then born inside of me.
These questions and feelings come up in these observations and all I want to do is talk about it. My approach to art is to explore my ideas, thoughts (even the “bad” or “nervous” ones) and the space surrounding them through color, layer and texture and a process of adding and removing paint. I don’t completely eliminate that feeling of being nervous because everything matters when I’m making art and I often ask myself “what's the worst thing that can happen?!” The dialogue I begin to have with my materials results in a painting that intuitively lets me know where it needs to go and answers an essential question: “did something happen?” YES. All of it happened. My way of working creates a narrative and a history on the canvas. Every shape and line has a story to tell and it is based in structure and space that is rhythmically and emotionally charged much like whatever situation I find myself in and my feelings that I need to let myself experience. I’m also working to tell stories with alternative endings because I’m interested in exploring that, too.
