Developing a way of working that builds on my specific strengths and passions is the key to making my best and most personal art. While creating these paintings, I explored many different aspects of my painting process, including painting techniques and materials and my studio environment, painting both inside and outdoors.

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What I've discovered is that I work best when I approach making a painting similar to how I approach my writing, through a series of rough drafts, with each draft building on the lessons taught from the previous ones, until a final draft emerges that is truly satisfying. 

 

Within painting, my rough drafts are sketches, value studies, color studies. I am more free, more daring and more bold when I can work through the early stages without the underlying pressure to make good art. I've learned to set an intention when I start a new piece, which allows me to see how my ideas evolve across multiple pieces. Working in this way also tests how committed I am to an image and whether I should move forward to a painting. 

 

The main challenge right now is how to maintain a sense of curiosity as I work with the same image over multiple pieces. The quick drying quality of acrylic paint gives me the freedom to build layers of paint quickly and a broad array of acrylic mediums, like molding paste, allow me to experiment with textures and transparencies to achieve various effects in the work.

 

The overall effect is a distinct and personal method of painting that combine my love of learning with the appreciation I have for the small moments of joy in my everyday life. I feel it's important to recognize and fully savor these happy moments when they occur because they are so fleeting. My hope is that looking at these pieces helps recall these happier times and reminds the viewer that any hard times will also eventually pass.