Happy Place Painting

Within these images, I have attempted to explore my intuitive responses to my life and experiences. I have sought to produce bold, outgoing images through my private and internal struggles to come into harmony with myself. Because my concerns usually center on a symbolic and narrative "˜inscape', I expect the viewer will become involved in his or her own interpretations. I am concerned with conveying the range of primal emotions, which every individual feels. I attempt to explore this emotive impact through strong color as it relates to abstracted natural forms. "Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul's journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one's own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after."1 I attempt, through my own understanding of the emotions I experience, to reach out universally with my images, trying to share what others might feel. I achieve this with the overt physicality of the abstractions combined with the active and expressive color. The work elicits an emotional response because it is at once aggressive and pleasurable. These are celebratory images, even when they display anger or aggression. They are so in the sense that even when these negative emotions are explored, they are treated as passionately and as forcefully as the less destructive emotions. My use of the landscape form exists so that I may physically structure my images around natural forces. The images in nature are inexhaustible, allowing for constant variety to examine and manipulate color and the other formal elements. Through this manipulation of natural forms, I trace the passion and vigor that is present during the works conception. I want these landscapes or inscapes, as I prefer to call them, to develop the personal symbolism within the image. To me, my work conveys the urgency in acting on ones own emotions. These internal feelings spring from outside stimuli and are acted out aggressively. Since I am a private person, I feel my work speaks visually of my personality in ways that I choose not to speak verbally. It explores the depth of my soul and mind. When I work on these images, the universality of the range of primal emotions alive in every individual is explored on a grand scale and for this reason I feel they are objects to which every person can relate in one way or another.