Frodo and Sam In The Dead Marshes Painting

I was born in Texas and live in NC. I have 6 children and was a behavioral psychologist until I retired this year at age 70. I am raising a 12 year old grandson. I have been painting and drawing all my life but have had little formal training. I find myself resistant to being taught, although I learned a great deal from an artist I posed for in NYC in the 60's, Douglas Gorsline. My first teacher was a hump-backed latino classmate in the 4th grade. Marie Elena was very homely and mis-shapen and she drew beautiful women and taught me how to do so. I did have some private art lessons, but as I say, I rebelled. I have shown and sold at small galleries through the years but have not made much effort to sell until I retired. I was once asked to take down my art at a Carrboro NC ArtCenter Outreach gallery. Carrboro adjoins Chapel Hill NC and that made me proud. I don't know how to categorize my paintings because I never know how they will come out, no matter what I intended. My paintings have multiple images that emerge without any plan. Sometimes I have an idea what I'm doing and end up somewhere else entirely. Sometimes the finished painting is upside down from how I started, but it captures the meaning I felt. The paintings are figurative and multi-layered. I know I'm done with a painting when the images start to move, one into the other. Painting is a sheer delight to me. My style developed at a time when art supplies were really beyond my budget and my house was full of little mouths to feed. I layered images over each other to save buying a canvas. I never saw my art as a means to make a living and have not pursued much in the way of showing or selling until I recently retired. I experience my art as a transporting, transformational act. It is a meditation on being in the present, letting go of any goal or destination. I spend months on each painting. Often people see images I have never noticed, while the ones I noticed are quite different. The paintings have a projective, Rorschach like quality. The paintings exhibit different aspects, depending on the mood of the viewer. I would characterize my work as outsider, surreal, visionary.