You Can't Eat Your Pride Painting

I make art to feel, to forgive, to accept, and to love myself. Painting provides my heart a voice where words are insufficient. Painting allows me to define and inhabit myself. I grew up between generations, ably digital but innately analog. I like to touch and feel. I long for extended full-body hugs. But I learned from a young age to suppress my emotions. Creating art was the puzzle piece it took me 35 years to find. It is how I fight against the digitization of my humanity and breathe life into my corporeal form. Painting gives me permission to feel anger because I can make it physical – I can look at it, name it, and release it. It gives me permission to feel sadness—clearing my head space enough that I can meditate on loss that I would otherwise force myself to ignore. Painting allows me to feel glee, to accept relief, to release, and to examine myself both critically and forgivingly. Painting opens my vast and arid self to much needed rain. My abstract creations represent an urgent itch – an endless compulsion to stay in motion. They squirm, burst, and urge with a potent, restless release. I enjoy creating works that challenge a viewer to embrace confusion, to submit to a visual hallucination, and to disrupt the linear thoughts dictated by their animal brain.