I am a digital artist exploring concepts of time, vulnerability, and human experience.
Each piece of my art is both a page from my secret diary and a time capsule illuminating life at a given point. My work is literally born from practice; it is my habit to create every day, capturing inspiration and emotion through space and time. Currently I am creating a time-based series of digital paintings called the Daily Art Habit. In this series almost every painting is a continuation of the previous day’s work. As of June 2022, it is built over nearly 1500 consecutive days’ practice. A single painting in the series can represent a timeline of anywhere from one day to many months.
As I create these paintings, I include inspiration from the environment around me – which may be represented by photographs I’ve taken, color, line and/or shape – and personal experiences of the day – sometimes written, sometimes revealed in different ways, like with color choices or line styles. My process of combining and layering elements is akin to collage and monotype.
On one level, the finished pieces are like time capsules, each contains the artifacts of a particular moment in time and space and the human and experiences that took place there. And on another, they act as secret diaries – allowing me to explore my hopes and fears, wrestle with technique, unearth my insecurities... all before I obscure the sensitive, vulnerable bits by painting over them or hiding them with other imagery... though of course I remember what’s hidden under the surface. And technically, it’s all still there on layers in the digital version of the art, recorded, but not revealed.
The process of making the art is recorded via time-lapse video of the individual actions that make up the paintings... all the ingredients as they go in – the photos, the written text, the brush strokes, the pencil lines – as well as the experimentation and techniques I use to create the compositions. These videos add additional time-based detail, creating a four- dimensional record of human experience in space in time when combined with the finished daily paintings and the layers in each painting.
Working on these different levels and scales spotlights that there is only one now... one unique moment in space and time, each one meaningful on its own, yet also connected as part of a larger experience.