something new
April 2023
Paintings
Unlike my past shows where the work spanned a single year, this body of work spans over 4 years, starting back in the pre-Covid times. The pieces that date back the furthest are the paintings – all made in January of 2019 in the span of roughly 2 weeks. Back then, my art was almost solely a way in which I coped with and processed my emotional experience. Creating was a necessity, a survival mechanism. While the product was something I enjoyed seeing, the process was an integral piece to my existence. Having never worked with paint before, every part of the process was an exploration. Whether it was how to apply paint to the page, what colors to use and how they combined, or how I could create texture on what I assumed would be a purely 2D piece – my mind began to think differently. In my day-to-day life, I started to imagine how I could take the colors I saw in the world around me and translate them through paint. My phone’s photo album began to fill with the sky at dusk, plants from the greenhouse, the full moon, and drove me into the archives of summer to images of the ocean.
In these early paintings, I was only beginning to figure out how to take what I saw and make it in paint. While my work was still mostly motivated by instinct, there was a new approach of starting to take my external experience and put it on paper. For me, this wasn’t in a form of realism but rather through colors and movement reminiscent of feelings. Darker colors and jagged edges typically aligned with stronger and usually negative emotions, while the smoother margins along with brighter colors accompanied moments of joy and hope, while at the time fleeting, still existed throughout what felt like darkness. Looking back at this collection, I find myself most emotionally connected to the painting, Holding Both, as it feels like it was the beginning of an attempt to hold both and all sides at once – the light and the dark.
Pottery
Throughout my time working with clay, my style has constantly been evolving. The early years focused on clean forms and glazing techniques while striving towards unattainable perfection. As I’ve continued to create, the illusion of perfection has become much less attractive. While I loved my process of making earlier on, like with my painting, it was also a necessity. On one hand, while making brought intense joy and allowed me to process my experiences and emotions, my critical internal voice also dampened my excitement. Although editing and critiquing are important parts of art, that side of me was over-zealous and could be stifling.
The way I think about my art and how I make now is different. Now I create because of the desire to create. It’s no longer a need, but a want. The transition into wanting to create has opened an entirely new lens through which I’m able to make. The bright colors, varying textures, and patterns are all part of the most recent collection of work. My foray into experimentation has brought more eclectic pots and new techniques that I’d never tried before. Despite my style’s continual evolution, this latest section is wildly different from all past subsets. While the forms are mostly consistent with past work, I began to apply different finishes and started to find joy in vivid colors and the unknown that comes with throwing completely new glazes all on a single pot and hoping for the best. This acceptance of experimentation occasionally equaling failure made room for spontaneity and surprise. This realization that failure could be an acceptable outcome no longer meant a definite collapse. In other words, I could try something new with the unknown on the other side no longer a deterrent but an exciting possibility.
