This last year has been a very productive one for me and my personal art making. Although the first year of art therapy graduate school was incredibly intense and busy, I actually seemed to increase my studio time. I think one way of looking at it, is that I’ve been “practicing what I preach” as an art therapy student and intern!
My summer is about to get a bit busier, but all with good things (more on that later!) I know that I will keep returning to my studio practice, as it has been and continues to be an intrinsic part of who I am.
As usual, I’ve currently got about 6 different paintings going…I love being able to “dialogue” with each piece, and then switch the conversation to another one when I feel that the timing is right. Each day that I come back to them I find something new, that often leads me and the pieces into unexpected directions.
Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time developing my Sandstone Series. These pieces are highly textured, and I am using a combination of molding pastes, sand, resin pastes, paint, and sea glass that my mom and I have both collected over the years that she’s lived near the ocean. Each painting in this series, whether small or large, is built up from many layers – sometimes as many as ten. The process is incredibly meditative for me and I love combining the tactile with the washes of color. Often I will lay very wet washes of paint across the sandy surface, and move the canvas around so that the color stains and settles into the patterned textures in the same way that the ocean spills over the sand when the waves come in.
Below are a few pieces from this series…I am completing some more pieces in the series now and will post them to my blog and art site soon!
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