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I just googled "what does the color red mean" and pulled up about 4,620,000,000 results in 0.70 seconds. Whew. Over four billion results? Who knew it meant that much? But as an abstract expressionist painter, I believe that all I really need to know is what red means to me. And pink, yellow, cerulean, puce, vermilion.....name any color, and I want know how that relates to my interior landscape so that I can paint with a visual language that is authentic for me. If one certain shade of one certain color evokes a specific memory or emotion for me, perhaps it speaks the same for someone else who sees that color. I believe it is one of the most important ways I can connect through my work to someone observing it. A shared color "language" means the observer is going to "get me" and understand my point of view in the work. But what's even more delicious is that someone with a different color language might see something completely different than me, and their experience with my work will be just as valid, but with a potentially different meaning from my intention as I painted. I find that one of the most remarkable aspects of art - that it can be both a connecting experience as well as an expansive one.

Most days, when I paint it is completely intuitive and in the moment. As I paint and consider what I'm feeling about what I've started with, and basically just say - hey, what would look good next? Or what would feel good to play with next? The color story grows in response to those intuitive impulses and responses.

Sometimes, though, as I did with the body of work I created for my Enso Circle residency, I wanted the works to have an intentional point of view at the beginning, rather than waiting for it to emerge out of my unconscious. How did I develop, then, a conscious understanding of my own personal color language?

It began with a simple process for me. I created an inventory of emotion pairs, inspired and bored, for example, and meditated on each word. Did scenes appear in my mind? The more I could see in these mind-pictures, the more I could see common elements and colors. I used my journal to capture descriptions of these scenes and as accurately as I could a description of the colors in them. If there was a red color, was it bright? Bold? Warmish/orange? A shaded burgundy? Every nuance was important. The reason I chose to do pairs is that so I could eliminate any colors that might be common to both sides. You might think how is it that inspired could be the same color as bored, but I found as I worked through the pairs, some common colors like white, black, and gray were truly neutral for me, and some were not. In the end, I created lists of colors for 26 pairs of words. To see a list of the feeling pairs, click here.

To stay true to a specific intentional emotional viewpoint, I selected a color palette for a given work from my list of colors from the exercise, assuring a full value range and color harmonization. I found the resulting work to be especially resonant for me. In fact, after I completed my series on the theme of "lost", I felt a profound sense of pain and sadness. Nailed it!

In March, I was accepted into the online artist residency program, The Enso Circle. It has been a thrilling experience working with eleven other artists along with residency facilitators Michelle Belto and Lyn Belisle. It will all wrap up soon with the release of the catalog on May 30. The opportunity to join the residency came just in time to get me rebooted into active art making. As a resident, I needed to make concrete goals, and the weekly assignments and check ins kept me on task. I will be forever grateful for the experience.

And boy, did I set out with an aggressive agenda for myself. What is else is new, right? Having always been the intuitive painter, rebelling against intentional images or content, what did I pick for myself? Intentional art. Too ironic. But stay with me....there's a happy ending.

I could see from all across the artistic community - from friends to popular vlogs and podcasts - the pandemic has thrown almost everyone off their game. For me, I was deeply weighed down by overwhelming pessimism. Prior to 2020, I considered myself resilient, and yet by 2021, after the extended isolation and unrelenting powerlessness I felt in the pandemic, I called that resilience into question. I asked myself - What is the nature of strength in the face of loss? I found myself thinking about those who came before me, those whose roots from which I sprang, the starting point for the path of my life, and I found my reflection in the faces of old, sometimes faded and fuzzy, family photographs.  I saw them lost in the fog and miasma of pain and disconnection as I recalled the loss of family members and connections to traditions and places.  I knew them to be healed through the fragile bonds of love and sometimes just hard-fought perseverance through the passage of time. I felt the betrayal of that oft-repeated but never true – time heals all wounds. I have learned from experience that healing is not just “kiss and make it better” and resilience is not just “bouncing back.”

So, for the residency, I set my sights on creating a new body of work, based on the themes of "lost," "healed," and "resilient." Furthermore, I decided that each theme needed a unique visual language thoroughly vetted in my own psyche, and each theme needed to be executed in a different medium. I took as inspiration my own family photos and found stories to tell about home, family, and faith. Join me in the next blog posts as I reveal my processes for visual language development and post the final outcome of works created.