Still Here: On Art, Survival and Taking Up Space
I make art about what it means to keep existing, and I make it beautiful on purpose.
That's the whole story, really. But here's the longer version.
I grew up in Texas, on the prairie, in a house where the wildflowers grew taller than m and my parents kept bees. I picked blackberries off the bush by the AC unit and fished and swam in the pond all summer. I fell asleep to my grandfather playing country guitar in his big blue recliner in the back of my granparents house. I learned to paint at two kitchen tables…one where my Grandma Linda told stories of wartime England while we worked in watercolor side by side, and one where my Grandma Patsy loaded a square brush with two colors of acrylic paint and showed me how to paint “folk flowers”
I didn't know then that I was learning a language. I know it now.
I'm a painter and mixed media artist currently living in Maidenhead, England, which is a long way from the Texas prairie, but I carry it with me everywhere. I work in oils, acrylics, watercolor, oil pastel, and collage, often all at once. My studio practice is rooted in ritual: a candle, a playlist, a plant nearby, and an intuition I've learned to trust more than almost anything else.
My work lives in the space where memory and magic meet. I paint moons as mirrors. Whales as rebels. Flowers as resurrection. Horses as the companions we never have to ask for. Windows and doors as the portals they've always been. And people who carry entire worlds within their souls.
I don't tell you what to feel when you look at my work. That's not my job. My training in creative arts therapy taught me that the most powerful thing an artist can offer is a container, a safe, open space where the viewer's own story can unfold. I make the world. You bring yourself to it and together, we finish the painting.
I should tell you the harder part of the story too, because it lives in the work whether I name it or not.
I lost my first husband very young. I've carried that loss, and the strange, aching beauty of alternate lives, of the children we never had, of the future that went unlived, for a long time now. I'm also someone who lives with chronic depression and has, at my lowest, wondered whether I was worth keeping around.
I paint because the answer is yes.
Six months after my first husband died, I met someone. I tried very hard not to fall in love with him. We just absolutely go together, and about eight weeks after we met, he broke his back. The result was a spinal cord injury complete and permanent paralysis from the mid chest down. Both of us had our futures rewritten at 23 years old. There is something so particular about finding another person who understands what that is like: to lose everything you had planned, and to have to build something entirely new from the rubble.
We've been together fourteen years. He makes me laugh when life seems impossible. He is my biggest cheerleader, the reason I follow my dreams, and we have traveled the world together. I tried so hard not to fall in love with him, and I am so grateful I failed. I knot that I am so lucky to have found so much love in one life.
"Rebellions are built on hope." And hope, I've found, is not a feeling that arrives on its own. You have to make it. Sometimes you make it out of oil and canvas and a whale and a moon and a jar of metallic paint that catches the light just right.— inspired by a certain beloved space opera
I am, in this way, a lot like the whales I keep painting. Still here. Still moving. Still taking up space in the water and on land.
I'm a classically trained musician, actually…vocalist, guitarist, pianist, ukulele player, and the daughter and granddaughter of makers. My grandmother and grandfather sold their folk art at Canton Trade Days in Texas, setting up their tent together, making things and offering them to the world. Every time I set up my own tent at a market, I think of them. My work looks nothing like theirs, but I know the lineage is the same.
I believe art is for everyone. I teach classes, sell prints at prices that don't require a patron's budget, and share my process as openly as I can because I grew up believing that making things is a human right, not a privilege. I also want, one day, to earn serious money from this work and build a life that's fully sustained by it. I don't think those two things are in conflict. Beauty is both a gift and a livelihood. I'm building toward both.
My work has been called folk, surrealist, symbolist, impressionistic, expressive, and magical realist. A curator once described it as existing "in that liminal space between art and prayer, personal myth and collective longing." I don't paint to fit into any specific movement. I paint to survive. To remember. To offer a small, shimmering rebellion against despair.
If you've ever felt like an endangered species, if you've ever wondered whether surviving is enough, whether beauty still matters, whether you're allowed to take up space in the world, then this work is for you.
(It does, by the way. And: You are. You are.)