this year's been difficult for me,
I think for everybody, for a lot of different reasons.
Covd, the earthquake... I cut my hair [laughs]
and trying to process everything with a
lot of the contention
and fighting and things that have been
going on
around me, normally how I would process through that is I would
escape through painting
and really get into that
contemplative space where everything around you kind of goes away
and you're just focused on
what you're creating and working on but
i think this year
with everything, it was just too much for me
i had deadlines coming but i
was finding that i wasn't able to
produce what i would normally do. And then
One afternoon I was cutting lemons
in my kitchen counter and the light was
coming from
the kitchen window in a way that the
lemons were being backlit
and so the light was filtering in through
and the backside of the
lemon in shadows was just beautiful
normally when i set up
a still life painting, i think i
just position it naturally that the
light is sort of coming from the front
I guess I normally paint the lighter
side of things
it really flipped it on its head for me
to paint the shadows
I started painting a bunch of lemons - I
lovingly call them my covd lemons
normally i would paint a lot of outdoor
landscapes
and a lot of grays and clouds, a lot of
more moody paintings and
painting lemons has been really
cathartic for me
i think as all of us process this year
and some of the things that we've gone through,
i hope we're able to take a step and
maybe come down to the gallery
and and get out, and find that
contemplative place where you find peace and are able to
kind of block out the noise and the
chaos and the world around you.
That's what art does for me and that's what these lemons have done for me
so i hope you're able to come and
take a look at the show
of course there's still some of my
traditional landscapes as you
would recognize me, but maybe
Maybe come in and pick up a lemon.
A lot of my more traditional work of
what i'm
I'm used to doing is landscapes.
i really like a oversimplified version of a landscape,
just really breaking it down into
the light hitting the overall, big space
there's not a whole lot of detail, usually just
really the essence of a landscape.
I kind of processed this year a little bit
different and so
another thing you'll notice with this
year is i got some bright blue [laughs]
i feel like i needed a few more sunny
days this year than normal
along with some of the cloudy days
so.
generally when i when i'm painting
i get into that contemplative- like i was saying
that place where everything else kind of
melts away
and usually i'm just playing with the
color and the shape
and creating a space. I really like the
juxtaposition
of how peaceful and calm I
am, and at the same time i'm painting
storms and getting storms.
That's how i process a lot of my emotion
and a lot of, just the world around me. I tend to
just like the calmer colors anyway,
those gray days. I love a gray, stormy
day. It makes me really just pull inside
and as soon as it starts raining, I'm out
there with my camera
and it just gives me a lot to pull from
later
also, i noticed that whenever i'm driving
or
watching tv, whatever it is that i'm
being bombarded with images,
I find myself kind of painting them in my
head, and really processing that and so
some of my work comes from photographs,
but a lot of it just comes from
my head i feel like we take in so much
and it's just a way of processing some
of that and getting it out
through a more visual form
i'm starting to do more and more of
my smaller work on board instead of
behind glass.
I like the format of
them being more acceptable to people and not with the barrier of the glass
and because their traditional watercolor,
watercolors
like this had been pushed behind glass
for so long
that part of the reason i love this
medium that i work in is that i'm
pushing those boundaries of getting
watercolor
out from behind things.
and kind of breaking that barrier. I also
really like the intimacy of a small painting
that's why i work with the little ones so much. I really like
that it forces the viewer to
come and be in the same place that i was
when i painted it,
and get up close to see all that it has to offer
and so i go back and forth. I really
I mean i love a big painting but there's
also just that
intimacy of a small painting that
there's a lot to offer
so let me tell you a little bit about my
process
from the time i was really little, i
enjoyed watercolors. i think i was
four or five, when my grandma gave me a
set of watercolors
watercolor pencils
and I just remember sticking them in the water
I'm sure that's not how you're
supposed to do it, but
i remember i had a cup, and i stuck it in the water and i
just loved watching the
pencil as it reacted with the water to
start to
dissolve and make beautiful shapes and
from then on i was hooked.
I've been a watercolorist
all through high school and college
it's the medium that i enjoy
working with the most
but with that, i felt watercolor
kind of gets put in in a box of
"Watercolors"
and they're smaller, on smaller paper and
so i'm trying to really
push the boundaries of what we do with
watercolors
and make them bigger and get them more
accessible to a viewer, out from behind
the glass or the barrier
And so a lot of my work
has to be fixed - so i put a spray
fixative over them when they are finished.
but up until that point, because
they are watercolor
you're able to really play with the
medium. You can
almost completely erase it, which is
really
unusual for watercolor.
So what i would
normally
do for a painting like this is i would
paint the sky
and get kind of an idea where the ground
would be
and then i'm able to come back with
water and lift
out the white areas
and so with normal, traditional watercolor
you have to kind of keep those
white sacred,
and you have to paint around them.
but with doing a retractive process
i'm able to paint the whites without
painting around everything. And I really enjoy that
it also makes the process of watercolor
more enjoyable because i'm not so
worried about if i make a mistake or
if it's not quite right, or not going in
the right direction, i'm not married to it
where, in normal watercolor, you get one shot
it's there and you're good.
this allows me to
to work things out a little bit longer
not too long.
it's still watercolor and it's finicky
and so it will stain and it will bleed and it will
run all over and do everything that
watercolors do
but it does allow me to find a little
bit more control with watercolor and i
enjoy
that process of having things
that are there and then you're able to
pull them back out and just really push
and play with
the medium.
So i hope you can get a
chance to come down
and see the show in person. We are
keeping
the number of people down that can come
in at a time to 10 and we ask that you
do please wear a mask so we can keep everybody safe
and healthy.
the show will hang
until September 11th so if you do get a
chance to come down, i hope you can. But if not, it will
we will put the images online and you can always
look at them that way 
and just
Enjoy the show. Thank you
