07/30/2024
New paintings drop tomorrow- Wednesday the 31st at 2 PM CST. Link in bio will be updated!
In between the chaos of these summer months, the tangled energy between work and home, deep friendships and family relationships, sickness and health, intense rain forcefully cooling hot plants, and leaving all her inhabitants cloaked in a blanket of humidity, everything feels messy.
This time of year in Alabama is an intense season. It rained so hard my grandparents had to be pulled out of their car by firefighters. But we often welcome the flood- as the scorching sun leaves us begging for voluminous clouds, every shade of gray- occasionally the piercing sun shining through- casting prisms of contradictions on the landscape.
The landscape presents weathered grasses against the darkest shades of green. This is a jungle, the rainforest, most days. The kudzu will eat you if the mosquitoes don’t. I love watching the kudzu and other invasive plants swarm uninhabited buildings and swallow them back into the earth. If you need a reminder that nature is bigger than us, and we can only control the landscape for so long, come to Alabama, drive down a small back road, and you will see her mighty envelopment. The transcendentalists would be proud.
She holds a mirror up to our weathered souls. We are overwhelmed and messy, our relationships, like branches, tangled, out of control. We get angry and burnt in the heat, but yet we still reach out for the sun, lounging about pool sides and rivers and creeks- teasing our bodies with the feelings of hot and cold- air and water. Repressing our own emotions in favor of light, pool side conversations in the oppressing air.
My paintings have always embodied the elements. Perhaps now, the forceful, uncontrollable beings that exist out my window are coming through a bit more raw. It’s a conversation I want to have.