“I recently mostly have done acrylic. If I do another art form, it would be more like creative essay writing, but that’s kind of a new thing. I have described my style as representational, impressionism, and conceptual.
The full immersion studio time at the end of my college career, a studio art class, I basically treated it a little bit like a half-time job. Go in in the morning, work, have lunch there, keep painting. I haven’t gone back to that level of painting since. Out of that came a large, 90-by-40-inch piece that ended up being shown at a festival. A few weeks later, people contacted me and wanted to buy it, and I shipped it out to Oregon. It was a really interesting experience of feeling very accomplished, spending lots of time on that, feeling like I nailed what I was trying to do, and someone else out of state appreciating it and buying it.
I was exploring melding some of my concepts. I had done some koi imagery and some space imagery, and then I’ve started putting the koi in space, sort of in this ambiguous space of water and space, with bubbles being planets – or not. We don’t know. I love that. I did one that was taking me into this culmination kind of piece. It was sort of like, ‘How can I creatively take things from my past pieces and do some convergences?’ I feel like that kind of thing is a stepping stone to some other work that might be needing to come out.
I have been here since 1998. I’ve witnessed the growth of the art community, and I’ve been part of some of those early attempts at putting art out in the public. I have been encouraged and met lifelong artist friends here. It excites me to hear other people catch vision and run with it. There have been lots of ways to bring artists together and cross-pollinate and give them space, and the downtown spaces. I feel like there’s been this continuous growth and expansion, and it’s even expanding more with this idea of an arts district. I just feel like the support has been exponentially growing, and it’s really creating a good, fertile ground.”
