Since beginning my journey with soft pastels, I immediately fell in love with Uart sanded paper, and for a long time, I didn’t even want to try anything else! There is just something about the texture, the way it works so beautifully with wet media for underpaintings, and its willingness to take layer after layer after layer of pastel, that makes it absolutely wonderful. But starting this past November, I made a concerted effort to try out several other different kinds of surfaces to see what kinds of effects I could create, and to understand which might help me best move forward more towards the vision I have for where I want to take my work. I learned a ton, found a couple of surfaces I will most definitely use moving forward, and one that I haven’t quite made up my mind about just yet…

This last quarter of 2022 I’ve set aside to really explore what it is that I want to convey in my work moving forward. I’ve started doing mind dumps of what interests me, what messages I want to convey, what feelings I hope to evoke, and what topics I want to explore. And that has led to the build of my studio mind map / vision board… 

It’s been a little over a year now. What first began as a trickle, then became a stream, and finally the dam broke, and now there is this explosion of creative energy that’s bursting out of me consistently. I’m at the point now where I know there is no going back. I’ve unleashed something that can no longer be contained, hidden away or ignored. I feel as if I’m finally beginning to step fully into myself, and I feel more alive than I ever have. And the thing I’ve been thinking about recently is what took me so long to embrace this side of myself. Why did I ignore the little tugs towards artistry over the years? And why is all of this taking shape for me now?

As Autumn draws to a close and winter approaches, I feel my creativity slowing, naturally following the rhythms of nature. Logically, I know this is normal. As humans, we’re not built to produce, produce, produce without stretches of time to be able to rest and recover. And, after all, I am making the conscious choice to prioritize time with my family during my favorite time of the year, Christmas. But that doesn’t stop the guilt from creeping in. From such a young age it’s instilled in us that if we aren’t consistently producing we aren’t useful or valuable. But I also know that some of the most incredible things emerge from stillness, if we’ll only allow the stillness to be…

As a mom of 2 young girls, I struggled for years to find a medium that worked for me and my limited amount of time for creativity. Over the years, I tried so many different things: acrylic paints, watercolors, oil paints, ink, etc. But all either took too long to set up, clean up, or dry between layers, or were too messy to start and stop with when I’d inevitably need to pause to get one of my daughters a snack or up from nap time. I never got to a point of completion with a project in any of these mediums, which left me feeling like a failure. Eventually, I just sort of gave up and let my artistic side go. As my girls got older, I’d do artwork with them, but rarely made anything for myself…