I started painting when I was twelve, and it’s something that was and still is very intuitive for me. Watercolor was my first love, and has remained at the core of what I do, although I mix my media a bit now. I love watercolor’s “happy accident” nature, how you can’t ever fully control the way the water moves the paint across the page to create surprising images and patterns. When you put oil paint on a canvas, it stays where you put it. Watercolor doesn’t; it moves and influences the other paint, and its transparency means that you can’t cover up your mistakes. It is an unforgiving medium; if you try to force it too much it turns into a muddy, lifeless mess. I find I’m better off being open to what the painting becomes.
My favorite thing about my work is the energy it contains. It feels alive to me, like it created itself and I only discovered it. There is so much possibility in art. I like my paintings to be fun and light, to make people happy when they look at them. I like to include some sort of abstraction in all of my pieces; purely representational art bores me a bit.
If my art is about anything, it’s about spontaneity and love of life, the joy of beauty and new things. It is important to me that it’s pretty, which is a term sometimes applied in a derogatory way in the art world, but I think pretty is good. Beauty is important in our lives and homes. People’s houses should be places that they go to feel relaxed and comfortable. They should have beautiful objects in them, be filled with things that make the people who live there happy. I think it’s good for art to be beautiful—beauty does not make art less exciting or interesting.
I’m inspired by things around me, patterns and colors in my environment. Usually I begin a painting with an idea of how it will look and when I’m done, and it rarely ends up how I thought it would. The painting and my ideas about it evolve as I work on it. I’m always open to change, ready to see what the paint wants to do.
I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, lived in Okinawa, Japan from 2006-2010, and currently live in beautiful North Berwick, Maine.
Thanks for checking out my site. I hope you like what you see.
