Mysteries on the Brink Painting

Each painting emerges from the threshold between light and shadow, motion and stillness. The artworks are a visual landscape shaped by the contours of our inner worlds. My process begins in emotion, translating the intangible currents of being into form. What unfolds on the surface is not a depiction of the external, but an excavation of what we hold within: longing, fear, strength, wonder, and the spaces between. I didn’t grow up dreaming of being a painter. I wanted to be a star—dancing, acting, performing my way through life with a kind of defiant light. For a while, I did just that: working in theater, running a performing arts center, even signing with Top International Modeling Agency Wilhelmina Models and living between stages, studios, and photo sets. Visual art came to me later, and almost by accident. My college roommate was a painter—occasional nights spent listening to Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Annie Lennox, Nine Inch Nails, and experimenting with color and line in the margins of our lives. I made art as a whisper, not a shout—something I sporadically returned to every so often like a secret ritual. Eventually, I followed my academic passions into a doctorate in Performance Studies. I studied embodiment, theatre history, feminist theory, abjection. I planned to teach, to stay in that world of rigorous thought. But after years of adjuncting, I felt called to make, to use my hands again the way I did when building sets for the theatre. When my husband gifted me an easel, I picked up a brush—not with a plan, but with quiet urgency. I began painting every day. It gave me something nothing else could: a way to feel deeply without needing to explain. A quiet connection. A kind of healing. Since then, my studio practice has taken root and flourished. I’ve exhibited across the U.S., sold original work internationally, and shared my process through press features in print, television, and online. My work lives in private collections across the world. Though my creative path has crossed disciplines and geographies—from Texas to Washington, North Carolina to California—each chapter has given me a deeper understanding of presence, energy, and place. Painting is where all of it comes home. I’m Redin Winter, a visual artist based in San Diego, California. I came to the canvas through the long corridor of performance, and I stay for the unspoken. For the felt but unnameable.