One of my favorite books and the most life-changing book I ever read was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. In it there is this sentence: “For all practical purposes, these landmarks are invisible to the natives, simply because they’re always there in plain sight.” That is, only tourists notice the unique beauty of the world around them.
I live to travel. I love becoming a tourist. I bathe in the energy of Places and bring it back to people in my paintings. By depicting regular places in the bright, vivid colors that their singular energy awakens in my heart, I can turn every viewer into a tourist themselves, whether it's in a truly foreign land, or in their own neighborhood.
By doing so, I can make them notice the beauty that has always been there. And isn’t that the goal of art?
Artist Biography
I was born 4 weeks early in Urbana, Illinois. It is for this reason I am now late to most events, to make up for gained time and keep the universe in balance. I remember tromping all over the University of Illinois campus with my parents and younger sister for the first six years of my life, and playing in the fountains even though we probably weren't supposed to. I started drawing when I was very small, and somewhere I have a picture of a humpback whale that I drew on a manila envelope when I was 3.
When I was 6, we moved to Winnebago, IL. We had a lovely home with a sand pit that my younger sister and I would use for wild desert adventures with our plastic Disney characters and a basement we could rollerblade around in. At night we would watch Muzzy and Rick Steves while dreaming of Paris.
When I was 9, we moved to Wynnewood, OK, to be near my mom's parents, but moved back to Illinois a year later, right as Y2K hit. I remember my parents huddled quietly over the computer as the clock struck midnight and nothing in particular happened.
In the summer of 2006, my parents and sister and I finally visited Europe–5 weeks in a RV! Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Switzerland. It was 95 degrees and wonderful and stressful and beautiful and surreal and everything I’d hoped for. I graduated high school in 2008 having never taken an art class, but the margins of all my notebooks were filled with sketches.
I attended the University of Oklahoma from 2008 to 2013, where I majored in Environmental Engineering... then Political Science... then Mathematics... then Math Education... and finally, Environmental Sustainability. After 5 years in school, I earned my Bachelor of Science and started work as a temp for the State of Oklahoma (Oklahoma Corporation Commission)--georeferencing historical aerial photos. I still work for the OCC today, only now in a full-time position as the Brownfield Program Project Coordinator. I am an artist with a day job, and I love it.
I started painting in 2016, after 26 years of studying and working in non-art fields. As you may guess from my loudly-colored canvases, peace and stability have never been attractive to my brain. I prefer their rowdier cousins–elation and excitement. To me, the world feels muted until the roar of a concert or a new tattoo or my first view of the Rocky Mountains or winning an award lights up my brain with electric pink sparks.
When I was 31, I was diagnosed with ADHD, to no one’s surprise but mine. There’s not enough room in this bio to describe the relief this diagnosis has provided for me, especially when treating it did not dull my artistic sense, but rather enhanced it.
I still chase dopamine, as you’ll see in my paintings. My subjects are scenes that lit me up when I looked at them—my brain fizzing joyfully like strawberry Fanta. My style—my gently-outlined hyperchromic renderings—is designed to bestow that same elation upon the viewer.
I’ve been told it works.
(And as an added bit of fun and a nod to my geographic upbringing, if you ever want to visit my painted scenes and see for yourself, all of my place paintings have GPS coordinates on the back.)
Happy exploring!