Q: Can you tell us how you first fell in love with making art? What set you on this creative path?

A: I’ve drawn for as long as I can remember. It’s been my regulating tool, my boredom cure and my concentration hack for over thirty years now. I remember sitting in church, bored, and asking my parents for a pen and the back of the church bulletin. It was always extremely exciting when there wasn’t a lot of announcements and thus a lot of blank space to fill up with horses, my shoes, my hand, my brother’s shoes and occasionally camels and palm trees. Holiday meals, the odd sibling recital, watching movies in the family room… someone always was ready to hand me a pen. Eventually, the napkins and bulletins and scrap paper turned into sketchbooks and those became part of me.

Q: In periods of self-doubt or creative block, what strategies or rituals help you rediscover inspiration and reignite your passion for making new work?

A: After art school, I took a long break from drawing. Art school had bled me dry. Expectations from professors of what my art should be, the suffocating environment of comparative art and the push for abstract modernism as the highest form of creativity ate away at my passion. Graduating art school, I decided I was done with any kind of public displays of art. I would still sketch, but privately and I turned my creativity to other outlets including pottery, quilting, sewing etc. This scratched the itch, but didn’t heal the wound. Going back to school and a whole career in psychology later, I decided to finally heal the wound and start painting again for me, but also in a public context. It felt like an important thing to do.

Q: When you're searching for fresh inspiration, where do you turn - be it a person, place, or piece of media? How do you transform that spark into something uniquely your own?

A: I have always loved drawing from life and have a deep need to collect small and Interesting objects. These objects usually become the inspiration for my paintings and whatever ends up in finished paintings, I guarantee the 3D inspiration is housed somewhere in my studio. Glass jars of shells are perfect for practicing organic circular forms, comic books provide a fun chance to work on detailed bold imagery, groupings of erasers and wooden spools of thread are wonderful for drawing the same thing over and over, but each with a different twist.

Q: What guidance would you offer to artists striving to develop a recognizable aesthetic, especially around balancing experimentation with authentic self-expression?

A: Give yourself time. I lost myself, for a time, in the expectations and comparison of others. It’s easy to see someone working in oils and go, “Look at their oils, my watercolor could never compare.” Or, “look how big their work is, my little piece cannot compete.” Comparison is the thief of joy, instead, change the narrative, “why do I like painting small? Why does it bring me joy?” And, “What about watercolors expresses elements of me and what I’m trying to say.” It sounds simple, but it can take time to gain confidence in self-reflection.