My parents left a toddler alone in a room with a newly purchased oil painting drying on the wall. I scaled the couch, and did a little finger painting. The results did not inspire my parents to send me to art school, small southern towns don't have those. Later, during fourth grade, my school made the budgetary choice of music over art. Rumors were, the art teacher may have been fired for smoking grass with seniors. Thus ended any structured artistic avenues until my second semester of college, third if I were counting the spring I "sat out," following a wild and rudderless first semester. I studied graphic design, but mostly enjoyed patterns, abstractions, and zero representation. Art for arts sake. I didn't have a statement to make, other than here is this this thing that happened. However, after I built my first canvas I was soon seduced into digital art. It was 1988 after all, and Macintosh and Adobe were blowing my mind.
I pursued more digital art through graduate school, dabbling and doodling along the way but never painting. I had fallen in love. I had handled it poorly. I was living in Oakland, CA when it began. It started out innocently enough, visiting art stores, a canvas here, a brush or two I didn't know how to use. I was just experimenting. Before I knew it, I had an easel, a studio in my tiny kitchen, Fatboy Slims Norman Cook Collection and The Cure Mixed Up. I found it east to extricate myself from enjoyable events, to rush back to that tiny kitchen, to paint. The image above was from those years. My first canvas from college, in its fourth or fifth iteration. Inspired by my Aikido master spitting a black enso onto white paper.
I moved back to San Francisco where I had lots of wall space, to create my own personal gallery. After 20 years in California I moved back to my home state of Mississippi, oddly enough, with much less wall space.
I would like to paint more, but I have determined the only way I can justify making more art, is to find homes for the ones I have. Many of these paintings are very personal to me and as I am new to shipping artwork I have not enabled a direct purchase option.
I have not considered taking commissions, but I'm willing to hear them.
