On Being an Artist & Writer

Trained first as a writer and then as an artist, I feel like I speak two similar but distinct languages. It's not that the words illustrate the pictures or the images explain the text but together they point to stories of our souls' journeys to wholeness. I am not translating between these two languages as much as traveling between the Country of Art and the Country of Language, crossing the rivers of words into islands of silence.  

Much of my work carries my unspoken longing to live in a culture that honors seekers and dreamers, artists and scholars, the nonverbal conversations among musicians and dancers. My paintings and one of a kind prints, in some way I can’t quite say, are like  poems, populated by travelers and visitors from dream lands and myth lands. 

As much as I love good talk, conversation and language, I value the quiet where we can hear the imagination, the soul, the wind in the trees, and the trees talking among themselves. Often I feel like language brings me closer to thought and art brings me into a vast and intimate land of rhythm and feeling, color, texture, and music.

During Covid, I signed up for a zoom calligraphy class. Shelter in place was the perfect time to revisit my long dormant interest in studying calligraphy. I love how calligraphers say they are "taking the alphabet for a walk." Making letters becomes a physical act and an act of contemplation, another way to celebrate and listen to language. I have often written words into and under my art work. I am beginning to let the words be part of the work. Returning to the practice of calligraphy has confirmed my sense that we often grow into what we glimpse.