My Process

Painting

After twelve years hand-painting shell pendants and earrings for my company Clearlight Jewelry (www.clearlightjewelry.com) I decided to try to paint canvas. The challenge of moving from miniatures to a large blank surface was intimidating, but I wanted to learn. In 2013, while living in Hawaii, I took an introductory oil painting class at the Honolulu Museum of Art. After purchasing a 48”x36” canvas from the local Ben Franklin Crafts store, I brought it home with a beginner’s collection of oil paint tubes, brushes, and mediums. Several weeks later, I was on my way to creating a large-scale floral painting. Trial and error dogged my efforts as I explored abstracts and realism. It would be seven more years before I painted my first “Mandala Flor” painting and felt comfortable with what I could call my process. Oil painting is, for me, a door into a multiverse of color. The complicated blending and balancing of medium and paint to create an imagined hue is the labor; putting brush to canvas and through force of habit allowing the arcs and undulations of movement to create a visual image…that is the joy.

As an artist, you do not always have control over your subject, medium, and ability to go from palette to canvas effectively. These things can take on a life of their own on any given day, and the struggle to create anything worthwhile can override your most fervent desire for expression. The need for continued effort is a driving force, a mainstay in the up and down currents of the daily emotional grind that creative work demands. I go to my easel, pick up my brush, and walk through the door into a world of color to bring my vision and my art to life. Through the work, over time, moments of satisfaction do come. 

Photography

I am drawn to textures, and nature provides them in abundance. The velvet softness of a rose petal, rough hewn bark, and the random castings of waves upon sand. I seek these impressions during travels and my daily walks to give them form through my lens. What appeals is the effort to see the subject in the moment of it’s life. Clouds disperse, trees shed, flowers wither, and sand washes away. The impermanence of the image adds value to the experience of capturing it. I dwell on this quite a bit.