As I consider the thought of who, what, how and why I became an artist, it becomes very difficult to define.  Being creative encompasses  many forms.  One can be creative in their business dealings or parenting.  All of us are creative in one way or another.  So why did I choose painting?  I will tell you my story.
As a child my life revolved around creating. I created little people to help me fall asleep.  I loved creating mud pies in my backyard and believed that they did get cooked in my little play oven.  But I was not encouraged to do art work. That was my sister’s creative talent. I was a singer.  I sang to everything all day long.  I sang in my dreams.  It defined who I was at the time.
When I was 30 I had an experience that changed my life.  I was taken by the hand and floated out of my body.  We flew up into the sky and were joined by many others.  My memories of this were the colors of the land we were flying over.  The flowers were made of colors I had never seen before and the air was so crystal clear that I could actually see sparkling prisms all around me.  I was happier than I had ever been in my entire life and flying felt so free.  When I came back from that experience I felt a desperate need to recreate those colors I had seen.

That is when I decided to try my hand at painting.  I started with watercolors and loved the ability to combine the different pigments making them into new colors.  I did two little watercolors of flowers and decided I wanted to keep them to remember my first work.  I took them to a framer to be framed and to my surprise was asked if I would be willing to sell them.  This had not occurred to me, but I said yes.
From that moment on I knew this was what I was meant to do.  For years I painted and took these works to weekend art shows where they were sold.  I was able to see other artist’s works while I did this and became even more inspired to better my way of painting.
From the beginnings of my painting I knew that I did not want to be taught this art.  It was important for me to be authentic in everything I painted.  Although I spent many hours looking at beautiful art work wherever and whenever I could, I did not allow myself to take any classes in art.  It was my intention to remember the gift that I had been given from that wonderful experience.  I felt that there was a purpose in my having that experience and learning from it.
Being a painter I feel co-exists with spiritual growth.  You cannot look at a flower and not be in awe of this incredibly beautiful living thing.  How did it come to be?  Why is it?  Who created it for our pleasure?  All these questions I am sure all artist’s have asked themselves at some point in their creating because as an artist you look deeper, feel the textures, and see the glow in the mystery of such beauty.  When you look at a cloud as an artist you see the nuances of value in the colors that make up this fluffy matter.  No longer is anything white or black or red or yellow or blue or green.  There are endless colors in everything we take for granted in our daily lives.  It only takes looking at one tiny petal of a rose to know that we are seeing God.  And it also helps us to realize that we as human beings are so limited in our abilities to truly see all the colors in that tiny petal.
This has been a long journey for me.  I have thought of nothing else for 28 years but how to make those beautiful colors.  Yes I have lived an ordinary life, raised a family worked as a faux finisher and owned a teaching gallery for 5 years at one point, but in all those years nothing has been more important to me than continually striving to do better art work, experiment in color combinations and be a better person along the way.
When someone takes pleasure in one of my paintings it fills me up with so much love I could burst from the joy.  I know then that I have painted that one piece of art for a purpose and it is connected to the right person to learn from in some unique way that I do not understand.  But the secret is that I do not have to understand because it is not about me.