Paint Slinger

As a child I had a keen imagination and a clever a mind, I was often found making things out of other things. All by my-self drawing in the dirt or rearranging my food to look like something else. I loved coloring books, but quite often I would color outside the lines, and add things to the page because I felt they belonged there. I loved arts and crafts at summer camp, making braided bracelets and miniature cabins built out of tongue and groove Popsicle sticks.

It wasn’t until I attended catholic school, and met a crazy art teacher, did I discover that I was in fact an artist. Our assignment was a still-life; she placed a vase with two sunflowers in it on the desk in front of the chalkboard, the sunlight flowed in through the large old windows of that dark art room, illuminated the yellow and the maroon petals and warmed the brown of their center, those flowers spoke to me. That was all it took, sun, flowers and acrylics. I’ve been painting up a storm every since.

My formal training included three art classes in high school, a winter of private lessons, and one college level art course, the rest I have cultivated on my own; along with the support of my teachers, friends, and family.

My collection of paintings range from watercolors, acrylics, oils, multimedia and a small selection of gel prints, I have over one hundred canvas in this tree house, numerous other works of art, not mention what’s still at the folks.

My subjects range from landscape to seascapes, flowers to trees; animals to abstracts, to my latest personalized collection of Tarot cards; each painted on different sized canvas.

Creativity comes in waves and my heart can be measured by frames. Time will pass with no artwork at all, I’m either content with my life and don’t need to express, or so discontent that I lay baren without seeds to plant. The control and the freedom that comes with artistic expression involves just the right amount of suffering to pour the heart out in color. Art is an outlet that can frustrate, but it what’s gets you through.

The “Paradise Orchids” (one of my masterpieces.)The creases of the flowers and the ridges in the leaves painted so precisely with the fine lines of the buttery oil paint in a ton of layers. The tubes of luminous red and sap green emptied, and the three boyfriends I went through before to complete it.

The Tarot card “Death,” I created a two paneled piece in acrylic with the Ace of Cups at the end of the cemetery. The beginning and the ending, marking the fall when I lost both my Grandmothers, all the colors where mixed with a hue of gray.

An untitled piece on gigantic canvas, I painted crescents that weave into each other, one side a blue moon with the stars, the other an orange sun with a tree.This painting can be flipped either way to put the tree on top or the stars. It marks the duality of my life at that time, the pros and the cons, the nights of the old and the days of the new.

My menagerie of artwork has been displayed around Eastern Maine: Local Fest, The Mall, The River Tree Café, The Village Green Art Show, and my “Tree House Gallery”, but those must be rearranged and traded off to the closet as the walls haven’t any more space to give.

I also exhibit my artwork for judging at the annual Blue Hill Fair. In the last five years I have been awarded 4 Second Place, 20 First Place, and 1 “Best of Show” for 2010, a total of 25 ribbons; that also accompany a small cash prize and get your name in the paper.

I paint mostly during the quiet of winter, although the budding of spring often infuses me with creativity. Some of my biggest discoveries were trying different mediums not following the directions and just producing art. No premeditated ideas, no deliberation, just slinging paint onto primed linen. Sometimes that is the most therapeutic part of painting; the rules are your own; a little color here, another color there, maybe a top coating with crackle paste; or perhaps epoxying broken shards of mirror to the canvas.

The music plays loudly, the distinct scent of oil paint lingers throughout the studio, my hands and forearms smeared in various color. The music no longer heard but fallen to the background of my thoughts, as I mull over the moments and the seasons past with the strokes of my brush.

We are all born something, I was born a paint slinger.