Art

How I Paint

When I was in middle school, I developed an obsession with colour and with fish, especially as they related to a dream about swimming in the reefs off the coast of Australia. In fact, as well as wanting to see the pyramids, I felt the warm water and saw myriads of tropical fish as soon as I picked up a paintbrush. Later, I wanted to paint parts of the body as they manifest in energy centers, or chakras. In teaching, I knew the value of free writing so I tried that in painting and it worked to bring out the images that often seem hidden in my painting. I was always weak at presenting a thesis statement for an academic essay; so also, in my painting the ideas do not surface clearly. Today I describe my painting as both abstract and representational. As Michell Cassou and Stewart Cubley state: “There is no need to define yourself by the label ‘abstract painter’ or ‘representational painter.’ You are not a ‘painter,’— you just paint.” In approaching a white, blank, canvas space, I do not have a particular image or images in mind. My training is not in geometrics or architecture, logic or formal religion. Despite that, I am drawn to some of the ways that the sculptor Barbara Hepworth has described the ambiguity in her art, the ways that sculpture is “about images floating in space.” Yet the austerity of political oppression as opposed to utopian visions that emerge for me as viewer of her sculpture garden help me to define my own, very different, sense of lived experience. As I try to catalogue my paintings, I see themes and repeated attempts to present the same subjects in different sizes and settings. Below are two places that have inspired me to the creative processes of both writing and painting.

1. Pender Paintings.
2. Baja, MX:  Paintings of Pain --the search for cave art and mystery of the painters
   1. Sea of Cortez and the shallow waters
   2. Boat trips showing the rough terrain and small spaces in larger ones
   3. Sand and sea
   4. Caves of the mind