My low tolerance for boredom is always leading me in new directions. I am endlessly inspired by the natural world and the colors that surround me. But how could/can I go beyond just imitating nature and put more of my authentic self into each painting? This is an ongoing experiment. Words, collage and drips have been creeping into my paintings, on and off, for years. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I went with it. Now I am more enlightened. I have always loved to journal. Writing helps me sort out my inner workings. I write every morning to clear my head for the day and set my priorities. I never reread or save my journals. I write in my iPad, and immediately erase it. It is personal. So it makes sense to lay down a layer of words on each canvas first, setting the intention for each painting. Also, I am a messy painter. I stab at and scrub my paintings, I ruin my brushes, and my paint flies. Instead of continuing to try to hide this flaw, why no embrace it. I began to randomly (and messily) drip colors down the side of my canvases, obscuring the words and adding some colorful disorder.
And, as for collage, that has been a comfort for many years. I have always enjoyed ripping out colorful pieces of paper and sorting them by color family. I have stacks of sorted papers, mostly gathered from junk mail, catalogs, old catalogs and the few remaining magazines that I can get my hand on. Once I have the canvas covered layers of colors from the words and the drips, I try to match my pieces of paper, like a jigsaw puzzle. Though I have never had tolerance for an actual jigsaw puzzle, I seem to have endless patience for matching random torn papers to random painted drips and words on a canvas.