Relational Musings…
Is it the act of attaching words and images to experience that reveals the underlying fabric of life?
Eyes of Love, oil on paper, 56x76cm
I use paint to understand the liminal reality that exists in relationship to our lived experience. I am interested in the stories we tell ourselves about what is true, particularly when it comes to personal relationships. I believe we are limited to live within our own personal paradigm while maintaining the belief that we live in a shared one. To what extent is is possible for our paradigms to intersect or overlap? It is the pursuit of blending these states of existence (as with a Venn diagram) that is the root of romantic love? We don’t ever arrive, and we rarely acknowledge that the destination will keep shifting.
I paint to make the sensation of this awareness more malleable. Something I can illustrate before me, so that I can manipulate it and watch how it responds to my interference. Our conditioning begins before birth, where our parents naturally project onto the unborn baby what kind of child they will have and begin the journey of raising us according to their vision. It is impossible to escape this well-intentioned conditioning until we can identify it as adults and reclaim authorship of the expression of our souls.
Like tides, we grow ourselves and like tides we unravel too. With each motion we are writing layers of story over the ones we have lived until that moment and forming our latest best version of what we believe means truth. The truth of who we are, of how we are loved and by whom. The narratives grow tentacles, or filigree strands of a feather as we populate more time, more space, more interactions. Like jellyfish that comprise multiple organisms while holding their form, we are a composite of our experiences and the way we interpret and file them in our minds.
My paintings speak of layers, filters, conditioning, competing narratives, the spectrum from enmeshment to isolation; the scales that hover between so many extremes and that exquisite moment contained in the tipping point where, between one and the other, we are in-between. In all of the exploration I can do with my mind, such as applying myself to learning about relational structures, what remains is a felt, lived locus of what is most real. And the defining quality of that strange essence, is that it is viscose. There is a fluidity that encourages expansion and contraction, motion, creativity! There is no finish line.
You will find traces of this source energy in my paintings and they may speak explicitly to you or they may stir something untouched and ill-defined but yet present in you. The painterly language evolves, and each painting is a place of pause on a continuum. It is who I am much more than it is what I do. It is both. It is always both!
