The Body is a Landscape

The Body is a Landscape

The Body is a Landscape

Portraits

Portraits

Portraits

Written on the Body

Written on the Body

Written on the Body

The poem, History, flew out of me onto paper in the wee hours one night and morphed into a drawing which turned into the painting, Written on the Body. If you look closely, you can read the poem in the painting. I had just been in an automobile accident, and it became all about the body. I had to spend a lot of time in bed, and to keep sane/happy, I had to make art. I wrote in bed and painted in bits and pieces, through the pain. The paintings in the series, Written on the Body, are all about the body post-accident.
Angels and…

Angels and…

ANGELS AND…

PAINTING ANGELS

The first angel was an accident. Or I could say she just arrived. I was in a dark place. The angels that followed were like the work I’d done years before, of demons and almost-humans that reflected my life and observations and what came to me in the night. I had always put my life on paper, pulling the terrible out of me so I could breathe. At first, my angels were mostly fallen angels, full of longing and despair.
Then it was time to put the darkness away. I painted angels that would keep watch over us. Now I believe in Happy. I think that if you believe, you can find it.

The Gladstone Hotel Exhibit, 2013

The Gladstone Hotel Exhibit, 2013

The Gladstone Hotel Exhibit, 2013

ABOUT THE PAINTINGS IN THE GLADSTONE HOTEL EXHIBIT, 2013

2013 was a very dark year for me, and all I could do was turn to art. I drew broken, desperate people. I began a painting from one of these drawings and put mountains in the background. When friends came by, they saw an angel: the unfinished mountains in the background had become wings that sprung from the creature’s back.

I wrote a poem, only feathers string me across the sky, one nudge or wrinkle and I fall, crash through violet dusk and skyscrapers, this wingless, landlocked, flattened creature of despair, which described the fragile threads/feathers that kept me alive, that kept me from falling through sky. When I started to paint, what appeared on my canvas was an angel that hovered above the city, pulled upward by her wings. People saw her as they needed to: as a guardian angel, an angel of hope, or an angel of sorrow. That painting was Angel Over the City.

At around the same time, I was driving home one evening with the radio on, when the host began talking about Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest who fell into a state of despair when her daughter, Persephone, was abducted by the king of the Underworld. It occurred to me that I was Demeter, longing for my daughter who had moved across the continent, and I was Persephone, mourning my mother who had just passed away. I wrote a poem, then began the series of drawings and paintings of Demeter and Persephone, which include Demeter, Persephone and Persephone and the King.