Sunset

Acrylic, 11 x 14, 2025

It’s good to want more than the narrow lines we are supposed to follow. It’s good to want to create our own story. With our own marks. With our own colors. No matter what it might look like. No matter how it might be misunderstood. At least it's ours.

When we color outside the lines, the lines become obscure, the image loses focus. And we can’t tell what we’re coloring anymore.

But we keep coloring. Even though it is vulnerable, Even though we don’t know quite what we’re creating, We stay with it. It may become something. We think we know. Until it becomes something else. And then becomes something else again. Moving toward more and more beauty.

We can hold loosely the image we are coloring. We can see it and not see it and then see it again. This is what it means to become.

I grew up watching Bob Ross paint his fluffy clouds and insist there were no mistakes when it came to painting. I was mesmerized. It was many years later, when my son started first grade, that I started to paint. It was a place of experimenting -- and discovering what might happen next.

I like to paint silhouettes of women with different attitudes, colors, postures, and backgrounds. I like to use light and dark to convey the physical and emotional expressions women may have, in all kinds of situations and states of being. I paint in acrylic, mostly, as I enjoy the many layers that can be added. Some of my paintings have been edited over several years which gives them a sense of evolution and depth.

With all of painting there is waiting. There is nothingness. And yet, something emerges. Eventually. Mercifully. Only to disappear again. Into the darkness. Until the next moment. And the next.

We must bear the grief that there is no arrival. Only being found over and over again.

I like to paint silhouettes of women in the waiting -- with no urgency or destination. Open and welcoming of the next moment.