I have a confession…

Make it stand out

And it feels like a weird revelation.

I feel this profound, joyful, but terrifying urge to release all of my animal guide paintings. To thank them for their journey and set them free, because I am being called to dive, painstakingly and wholeheartedly, head-first into the vibrant, luminous world of the abstract mark that has been pulling at me. The way I can throw paint onto the canvas, use my hand aggressively to smear it and step back to be still for 5 minutes while contemplating the story that one mark was telling.

It feels like the only language that can finally speak my native tongue that I was never able to speak. It’s the only container that can hold the universe of emotion I’ve carried, unexpressed, for all of my life.

Inside every single mark, there is a world. A vision. A feeling so huge and utterly true we’re usually too afraid to give it voice. Each mark is pure, unfiltered life moving through me. I can work fast, quick, passionate, and impulsively. My hand finally can dance in time with my soul. I can tell a story of pure light and shadow through the paint, a poetry that only this beautiful freedom brings. A freedom that my bones have always needed to feel. Unconfined.

Lately, the animals… they feel like a chapter, but one that has ended. They are not enough to express the full, dazzling, complex spectrum of what true emotion FEELS like.

There is an infinite depth inside abstraction, a radiant truth, and it is surging forward, demanding to be seen…somehow seen…