Lullaby 48x48

48x48 (4ftx4ft) Acrylic/ canvas/ glitter/ resin. Ready to hang. No, I do not use AI to write my art.  Lullaby She had a bedroom in the summer of 1999 with electric purple walls. Each of us painted the palm of our hand and pressed it onto the back of the bedroom door. It felt like marked proof of belonging to somewhere. We’d drive her Moms 84 Dodge Caravan with the wood exterior to Sally Beauty Supply to buy powdered bleach and 40 volume developer. Just for something to do together, we fried our hair over and over that summer. It felt like freedom and control existing in rhythm.  They were a family of theater kids, and she’d hang my art projects on her bedroom wall. There was an orange cat named Howard that didn’t like me. My friend was a brilliant perfectionist even as a teenager, and her boyfriend was a drummer who loved Dave Matthews Band. Which, back then, paired with Birkenstocks, frosted tips, and yellow polo shirts, was an entire identity. When I hear the DMB song #41, I’m taken aback like a clap of thunder into that room with the purple walls, the smell of bleach powder dusting the air in the Midwest humidity, and the priceless sentiment of not yet knowing any of the life lessons waiting for me and what they taught.  I was 15, and I loved to wear thick glitter chokers and star barettes in my cropped bleached hair. Cartoon baby T-shirts and a wrist of plastic bracelets filled with water and (yes, more) glitter. Sometimes I still search the internet for a yellow Dawls unicorn t-shirt, but there is only one available for $275 on a resale site. I can't bring myself to be clean from all mood-altering substances for this many years and still paying that kind of money for a feeling to arrive in the mail. But I know it’s that adolescent version of me in that glittery unicorn shirt that can’t bear to look at the stacks of blank canvas in my studio. Even if it means I might ruin everything I’ve built and paid for by getting my mind all over the place in a way that someone can first see, and maybe subsequently feel. Vulnerability and madness balance in a fine line for me. Even as I write this, I wonder, who cares about what I think or feel? But.  I have to make things, because I think it’s in the moments of the process that I can belong to nothing and feel empowered by the sensation of free-falling instead of afraid of it. When I can let go of outcome, what surfaces are the bright, high-frequency, safe rhythms of light and color that make up a tapestry of positive vibration and radiance.  A few years ago I fulfilled a dream of going to Tate Modern. It wasn’t what I expected, as 90% of the art was about suffering, slavery, and violence. I’d imagined walking the gallery and feeling deeply inspired, but I was only exhausted and sad. I’ve analyzed the bad things that have happened in my life to no end. But my paintings and their stories that bring them to life are only for the best parts. I know that much of my purpose here is to hold great light and darkness, but to transmute the darkness into connection through light work. Memories of a summer in 1999 are a foundation of that kind of light.  As for a lot of my experiences.. I thought I made it out alive, but there is no out, and alive is merely a shifting perception that gets easily lost in the grind of day to day. This painting is a portrait of what’s really mattered in my life. Taking those instantaneous memories with their colors and stretching those moments of safety and gratitude into a new form.