I really love pen and ink drawings. The fine black lines on clean paper, with well-defined, tiny details thrill me. But I also love colour, and I’ve always loved photography. In my artwork, I combine these loves, harvesting the most interesting ideas from my sketchbook, plucking bits of beauty from my photo libraries, and pulling them all together with my graphic design skills.
This art describes a feeling I had. I turned inward and found some currents of life moving through and around a constant center. Things flowed with grace and variety, yet were rooted into a simultaneous steadiness. The whole world moves swiftly and unfolds continuously with stillness at is core.
Aliveness flourishes with wild and beautiful complexity in nature. There are jewels of otherworldliness and unfettered exploration— from compact potential to expanding growth. Within the complexity we can recognize something familiar. Something of us is in it as much as something of nature is in us.
Sometimes a longing arises for something that has been long since forgotten. In this drawing, a rescue mission is happening to retrieve a lost part of childhood, needed for the completion of a feeling bubbling up from underground. A specialized vehicle is needed for this delicate mission.
This is my inner sanctuary. Behind me there is a large tree with big roots. I usually imagine myself sitting against it with my legs resting along its expanding roots. I first encountered the idea of an inner sanctuary through a friend at Yashodhara ashram in 2003. The exercise of imagining an inner sanctuary came from Shakti Gawain.
One of our day-old chicks fell in its tiny water dish then got cold and became sick. I held it in my hands all day and fed it with an eye dropper. Toward the end of the day it died. This art is about the sadness I felt, and the wonder about life and death. It was humbling to be reminded that love and will are not enough to steer life and death.
Life in the clouds, life underground, life in the water, life on the surface… Things appear to happen independently. In this drawing I explore the intricacy of interconnection. I trace the flow of different systems as they might evolve through their own aliveness, and relate them back to a larger, unified aliveness.
The theme for this commission was Mother and Son. My client wanted something personal and left it open to me. In this piece, shared roots and intermingled growth illustrates the mother-son relationship, with a bridge connecting to the heart of each life. The different skies that layer through the branches are the days—feelings and experiences that are shared, moved and breathed together. The door represents the world we explore in shared experience, that is different from the world of individual experience.
I had planted a few seeds in my imagination: some goals, some ideas, some wonderings… This drawing is about growing those seeds, setting sail on an ocean full of hidden happenings, finding land, letting the wind carry me, and watching what grows from quietly planted seeds.
This drawing was inspired by the way the mind can conjure reality and penetrate it at once. The growing branches are like pathways that thought has created, while the leaves are like ideas that have sprouted at the end of a thought. The roots draw resources from the water, representing thought drawing resources from emotion.
My son was very interested in gondolas at the time that I made this drawing. The experience of flying over and through as a means of travel interests me too! This piece is inspired by journeys I’ve been on, and experiences I’ve had, dreamed or imagined.
My son Cas asked me to make him a drawing. At the time, he was interested in a moon necklace I have, with a glowing moonstone in it. He asked me "What's it for?"
”I think it's for a sense of magic, mystery and adventure.” This drawing comes from there.
At the time of this drawing, my sense of the feminine felt absent, covered over by busy-ness. I felt a longing for her energy and searched for it through my drawing. She rose powerfully out of nowhere, quietly and softly, immense, with limitless gifts pouring forth into the world. I was reminded that she is always everywhere, if I am open to her.
This drawing expresses shifting emotion. The experience was a transition from a vulnerable feeling of being pulled downward, as if pummeled by heavy water, to an ebullient feeling of rising to the sky. Both feelings were present at once, with the regular fringe of imagery and symbolism chasing the edges.
Sometimes I experiment with observing my beingness before it converts to symbols, words, thoughts. Feelings and sensations have abstract qualitites like textures and colours in that space.
This drawing explores the idea of interconnection. The needle and thread in the drawing represent how we can connect all moments by the thread of our own life force. The patterns of life grow in a vast tapestry of potential, weaving in and out, from the seen to the unseen.
Thoughts and feelings can sometimes be uncomfortable, heavy, painful and complicated. This art piece was created on one of those days, when the inside felt like something that must not be touched. But of course, it must be touched.
I love the way Swedish Aspens are always reaching upward. Trees seem to be feeling their way into space as they live - always turning themselves to gather the light. I like the idea that we can “turn a corner” in our growth throughout life, or keep reaching upward no matter which direction we set off in.