FRAME OF MIND
Artist Approach
Making visual works of art as restoration towards the awareness of what is true. Thresholds of paying attention and living in deep listening to find the spaces we live in and houses of thought tunneling towards mystery.
CREATIVE PRACTICE
As an artist my approach to making is first an act of paying attention. To become aware of the noise and then to enter silence. I have found there is space that is accessible with courage to let myself be affected by what is true. To choose to belong to a moment without the need to invoke opinion or value and create from thoughtful honesty. I’m interested in making from the state of softness - the sacred space of letting yourself be moved by beauty without understanding or a thought catalogue to place it in. Allowing a sanctuary of sorts to remain in awareness and dropping into being. I think this kind of depth is optional - to be childlike in the awe of paying attention, to listen to the wonders of the world and its mundane moments and enjoy its magic. My work is a work of process and progress to eagerly learn how to deepen my relationship with becoming a listener who knows how to ask the world good questions. I do this partly through pouring paint and letting it find its shape- making watermarks and adding layers to mimic the complexities i find in experiencing emotions and the movement of them through color and texture. Playing in mixed media of pastel and pencil with acrylics gives me a more complete picture of joining the head and heart space. Responding to life and reforming spaces of safety and restoration on canvas.
“Essentially, all expression has two noble intentions: to try to say what is unsayable and to bear witness to what is.”
― Mark Nepo
I'm interested in what happens in how we approach art as we "grow up." If you watch young children make art they usually excitedly take a marker and scribble something with absolute certainty about what it is they are putting on paper. You can't help but admire their point of view. It's a confidence i'm trying to relearn as an adult and an innocence I’m practicing to return to. At a certain point we mature in skill and thought and with that comes the frustration of not getting things right. I think there's a perspective available in making and perceiving art that holds a lot of joy in what we knew in the beginning. To authentically tell a story thats made and sometimes, prioritize the authenticity of truth for the composition that can result in "bad art." As i journey through time a language to make sense of it all for me is color and lines and layering them to make locations to move through emotions and arrive at places of being. In that place I find the abstract to be really very literal- the way that mystery is quite logical. We aren't meant to understand everything, just to pay attention and heal our perceptions.
"Beauty addresses us from a place beyond; it captures our complete attention because it resonates with the sense of the beyond in us. Beauty is the ideal visitation; it settles at once into the 'elsewhere' within us. It is as if we are in exile and home comes to visit us for a while. This is how some of the completion and satisfaction we feel in the presence of the Beautiful."
-John o'donahue