Sharing a few of my most recent paintings that I have both started and completed at the top of 2021! Read more about the process for each below and you can stay in the loop by subscribing to my monthly newsletter.
Night-Time Walker, 2021, Flashe paint on paper
I have been particularly inspired by the petrified trees I see while running. They stand out amidst their surroundings, often feeling intensely vulnerable or naked as if their color and bark had been stripped from them. I found myself connecting with these trees on an emotional level, as I felt I could empathize with their situation.
I wanted to create a scene where this sighting feels powerfully cosmic - like a goddess reining over the forest. The tree is able to call her power back and align herself within her own space. I also connected this experience back to one of my favorite Coheed and Cambria song, Night-Time Walkers:
Night-time walker, keep your distance / Stay away from us, stay where you are / History repeats her story, awakened by the sounds of long before / I don't wanna see you, I don't wanna believe you're here / But it's too hard not to when your songs I hear / And all the sweet repeats that make her so beautiful
Maybe it's alright and the world's not quite / What you believed is now all upside down
Wayward, 2021, 8" x 10.5", Indigo, watercolor, charcoal and flashe paint on paper
Wayward is a more literal human goddess. This smaller sketch is on hand-dyed indigo paper and is inspired by Saidiya Hartman's powerful words and imagery throughout her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The book beautifully captures stories that have gone untold and while her words conjure specific experiences that I may never truly be able to understand, the quote below still stirs my soul:
Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe...It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.
I found myself captivated not only by her writing, but the images that accompanied the text. The first photograph was so striking and I felt immediately connected to this “forgotten” goddess. I highly recommend the book :)
I think my flashe paint works provide me with the immediate gratification I need to power through my more labor-intensive pieces. I completed a new piece that is a larger scale and uses pigments that I have gathered myself to use as oil paint (you can read more about the process here). This piece initially came out very quickly, but I hit a bit of a rut towards the middle of the month...
Probably overthinking this painting
Despite somewhat belaboring the piece, I feel that I finally reached the place I wanted to with the work. The painting takes me to an undefined place within my psyche and as I was painting, I was working through an intuitive state by responding to the materials and pigment I had collected.
Title Pending, 2021, 49" x 37", Oil paint made from pigments and clays gathered from Georgia and throughout the South East
Perhaps this is just the essence of the earth below me or perhaps it is a place of my dreams. Regardless, I found myself drawn into a place of letting go.