Reaching

This painting has a lot of history and layers. It was started as a live performance piece. Painting while music fills a space is a powerful and unique experience for me as a visual artist. It helps create space for new and unexpected impulses that I can let drive my image creating processes. I never fully know what my image will look like when I start a painting. The waters were painted first as a blue background. The hand came next. Then more water moving over and around the hand. Together they make a cupping motion, as if to collect some fresh moving water for a drink. This was a very satisfying and fulfilling experience to get to this point in the artwork for me. I felt that the piece was and is a great example, a culmination of my style of visual communication. It sat like that for years.

I never thought it was finished. It wasn’t until I heard about anno artem and saw their open invitation to participate in a gallery focused on mental health that I knew this piece was meant to be a part of it. When I looked at the painting, I knew the pain and scarring was missing from the piece. For me a deep yearning for more and a longing for healing and refreshment is often born from those painful scars.

Reaching is a painting that illustrates how life will often push us to reach for nourishment out of the pain that our lives circulate around. How we sometimes reach for hope but grasp lost. How we reach for love because it’s elusive and slips through our fingers.

Acrylic on Canvas