It all started with Christmas 2008- My parent’s living room is a beautiful cerulean blue with a tiny touch of cobalt (I picked this color by the way…) When the light from outside shines in, everything in there starts to glow… anyway, the photos that I took were all so beautiful and inspiring, with the blue and the light and food and happiness, that I decided to paint a small series of them (at the time I was studying with Marc Handlman, so painting in series was a must). The paintings came out well, and I discovered a lot about what I like to paint, what colors I like to use and where I put them and why, and what really inspires me to put paint down in the first place.
Two paintings of mine in particular really revealed a lot of information about me to myself ( and probably my professors as well): a portrait of my dad sleeping in his chair, and these poached pears in a cobalt blue casserole dish covered in plastic wrap.
I got less representational in my physical painting of these. My mind started going more toward of the direction of ‘what do I need to do in order to get this point across?’ and ‘I’m going to do this in order to give the impression of…’ I abandoned ‘I really want this to look this way’.
It was then that I semi-stopped planning out my images. It became more about a certain energy and a feeling of intuition.
That is exactly when I started the water paintings. I needed something to paint, so I decided to start looking through my photos (I always work from my own images). I came across pictures of me and a few friends swimming in a fountain. There were a few images that really made me excited- the camera looked through the ripples of the water to our hands underneath. The water bent the images and the colors. I thought ‘How beautiful. And I bet most people wouldn’t even notice this in the picture, they’d probably go straight to the faces above the water. As I looked more at the images, they weren’t even about the friends anymore. They were about light and color and distortion and above all, water. Water does, after all, have complete control over those things when present.
I worked with water as a subject for the rest of the semester, and tried lots of different things, mostly to do with the action of the water’s surface.
Once I came back to school the following semester in the fall, I started a whole new series of water paintings. Believe it or not, I didn’t really have a plan, it all just happened almost the same way as I initially started with the Christmas paintings.
I was sitting in my hot tub again with a few friends, and thought that the water looked really cool and started taking pictures of the surface. When I downloaded them, I was in awe of these amazing moments and images! I decided ‘oh boy, here’s my semester…’ those images dealt with pretty much the same things- light, color, distortion. There was something different though, they looked and felt like they had more purpose, like they were trying to tell me something.
Of course I ignored that something (because I had this very stubborn agreement with myself that I only painted to paint, not to speak) and started painting away. Then I had my first critique with Hanneline and she started talking about spirituality and stuff like that. I am a very religious and spiritual person, but I never had the intention of creating spiritual paintings at this time. I realized then and more throughout the semester that even when I don’t try to say anything or make meanings out of things, they are still going to come through in my art because I am full of passion.
After that very refreshing discovery about myself, I kept on my merry way doing what I do. After a few more paintings, I started getting flashes in my head of my thesis and what it is going to look like.
It isn’t going to be about beautiful water with distorted figures, even thought though such images will be used. It is going to be about reaching for God, the spiritual search and journey. It’s about coming out of the darkness and rising to the light of God. This is what my paintings have secretly been about for the past year and a half. Now that I have realized that I really am trying to say something, I can get the hell on with it.
After that epiphany, I held a handful of photo shoots in my friend’s pool and started taking pictures actually underwater instead of above it. At this point I have decided to use the water only as a tool. My subjects are now only the figures and their situation.
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