Live at TheArt of Shmee Show

It was so  exhilarating to be in a room full of my own creative explosions and to watch people engaging with every detail. THANK YOU to everyone who came out and brought their whole self ready to discover color and play in between the lines. THANK YOU to everyone who helped bring this vision to life and break it back down again. I appreciate your support more than I can even say, and love you so! THANK YOU to everyone from afar who sent beaming waves of excitement our way on Saturday. I do intend to turn this all into a roadshow one day and bring all the excitement back to you ...

My practice with watercolor and ink began during my first winter living in Brooklyn, NY after wrapping up four years of creative development in acting school and ditching my TV. I was in a major transition in life and awakening into far more questions than answers. Fortunately, I was invigorated with curiosity and had the works of my artistic and mystic predecessors to guide me:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

On snowy nights, I would sit at my desk (a second-hand coffee table with a pillow on the floor), crank up some dubby bass music and elevate into a state to create. This was The Answer to my solitude, to my emerging spiritual inquiry, and to my need for a creative outlet. Seven years later, this practice is one of the greatest gifts in my life, and has fueled a creative path that extends beyond the medium that started it all.

This practice is more than creative, it is meditative. It is a time for my mind to ramble on, pitching concepts to my soul. It is a time for my mind to listen, gleaning insights from my heart.  It is time for my mind to play, releasing stress and strain. It is a time for my mind to be open and free, flowing as an undefined identity.This practice is my teacher, helping me accept each brush stroke, sporadic as it may be, as an integral part of the Now and embrace the creative process as a vehicle for transformation.

Each piece in the show was born of this process and imbued with the bohemian tenets of Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love. (Ahem… Thanks, Baz Lurhmann and Moulin Rouge) I make an effort to bring my most authentic self to the table, and I offer this collection to you with the wish that you do the same. The perspective that you bring to the work is a key part of its presentation. This body of work is about discovery without definition. Perhaps the unknown isn’t some gaping abyss, but instead a colorful realm filled with imaginings that have not yet been born into thought. Discover yourself in the winding linescapes and abstract renderings; let your mind wander - it is safe to explore. I encourage you to dive deeper.

                                                                                            ~

“I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.” - Audre Lorde