On loan for a show in Yellowknife with the YK ARCC. Started at home and completed during CARTAE at AceArt, part of the Picking up the Pieces concept.

Fresco from Picking up the Pieces. This is one of the first pieces that I made in plaster on panel, after starting to paint abstract works to celebrate the beautiful marks of wear on the pieces of my 100 year old walls, that had to be torn down in order to create a liveable first home.

Pareidolia:

The perception of a recognizable image or meaningful pattern where none exists or is intended, as the perception of a face in the surface features of the moon, or perceived images of animals, faces, and objects in cloud formations.

I don't always make recognizable forms in my paintings. Sometimes general landscapes or skies form the leaping-off point. But I like giving room for people to find their own forms in them. Sometimes my own experience of pareidolia leads me to create something recognizable in an abstract image. Whether they’re abstracts or landscapes, I think the engagement is the same. I want to make paintings that are therapeutic to look at. Not always necessarily soothing to look at. Not like a beach scene that's calm, but makes you think, "Man I wish I was there instead of sitting here with these problems." I've heard research suggesting that people who encounter art receive less therapeutic benefits than a group of people making art. I took it as a challenge, to make art that did benefit people a lot just by looking at it. I also heard an interview about the positive effect of staring at trees on the brain, and I know that when I’m confused and stressed, being in nature helps me wait and listen and sort out inner struggles. And so I want to make work that affects viewers like staring at trees, or clouds, that engages them, that gets them in involved in "making the artwork" and that has layers and layers that all involve chance creating many possibilities for image seeing and finding details over the surface of them, that feel like something in nature. I want to create enough open space/possibility in them that it's possible for people's eyes to be engaged but they can also stop thinking about what they're seeing, and let their mind wander to things they might be worried about or need to think through. I am thinking about the effect they’ll have on people who experience them over an extended period of time when they’ve moved beyond the gallery.