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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.