For many years I’ve painted large, gestural abstractions of nature. I love the evocative ambiguity of abstraction, how marks and color carry emotion.
My paintings have become as big as my studio will allow, 8-10’, with room enough for the gestures and actions that come to me as a dancer. The larger the canvas, the more I feel I can include, quite literally, pulling in detritus from my studio and the ground outside (ash, pebbles, string, cardboard, wilted petals, etc.).
When my children were first born, the studio was the one place I could go to give space to my own thoughts. My artwork became more visceral and raw, to capture physical and emotional states I had never felt before. Being pregnant brought me into my body in a way that made me want to draw it, to comprehend it. Now I draw my children, taking pleasure in their small faces, and trying to hold onto their rapid growth away from me.
When I decided to bring my children into the studio to paint with me, I relinquished control of my last boundary: between being a mother and an artist. This changed the course of my work. It brought free-association and open-ended curiosity. They surprise me; they open me to doodling and remove some of the expectations I have for a painting. Through their contributions and a surrealist mining of my own visions, dreams, and anxieties, I look for a kind of everything-place, that can hold figures and abstraction, parenting and painting, being and wanting.
Landscape is still a way for me to address longing and loss. It holds turbulence and destruction as well as reflections of glorious light and regeneration. There’s a lot of grief. Anxiety grows like an invasive species, and nature is a therapeutic force. Painting with my children underlines the precarity of our future while allowing us, still, to revel and play.