open to it all (the light and the dark), acrylic painting on 8×10 inch panel board, 2021, click to shop

(I will follow you) into the dark, acrylic painting on 8×10 inch panel board, 2021, sold

I painted both these self-portrait-dreamscapes last summer — I’d just taken an online landscape painting course and was averaging one new painting a day putting my knowledge to practice.

Around that same time, my spouse and I had just decided to sell our Nashville home and travel the country. Growing up, neither of us moved around very much, and so early on in our relationship, we begun dreaming up a grand adventure of moving around nomadically and “trying on” new locations just for the joy of it.

At the time of painting, we were thinking of starting our adventures out west, and these paintings (both created using inspiration images from southern Utah) must have been an unconscious way of me imagining myself there.

I clearly liked what I saw and felt in these pieces, because Utah was our very first long-term stop on our adventures.

We’re in Southern California now and the other day visited Joshua Tree National Park, and ran into a boulder that very much felt like a manifestation from this painting! Creativity is the coolest shit.

AND SO ARE ROCKS!

~a note on painting titles~

As I painted these pieces in summer of 2021, I was moving through all the feels — grief of leaving a place that’s long been home, appreciation for our time there, and excitement for what’s to come, and painting helped me to hold space for everything present without needing to brush anything under a rug.

The titles of the pieces reflect my desire to honor this duality of light and dark present within me at any given moment. Lightness and darkness are neither good nor bad but rather two aspects working together to create wholeness.