Collections

Earth’s green things delight me—identifying wildflowers, sauteing buttery dandelion buds, welcoming stowaway wild violets, grasping rich garden soil, and photographing flora lifecycles. Nature was haven from childhood abuse and is oasis amid adult responsibility.

Nature’s roots run like veins throughout my life and, therefore, art.

The only time I strayed from my desire for color growing up was as a teenager, sketching chromatic pictures such as stamps and prints into the shades of greys using #2 pencils. It is always the challenge in my of trying to portray color through monochromatic variety, then, by light erasure, touch, and the pencil’s sharpness and today through deepening shadows, contrasting, and highlighting.

Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers, mystics, painters,
troubadours for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.
– Jacob Nordby

Color is a special gift not all of us receive. I am blessed to grasp, twist, and revel in the full spectrum this moment in time to suit a hunger for rich variety and kaleidoscope of play. However, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 100 women globally, or about the population of USA, are color blind in one of the many ways the brain interacts with our sight. I chose to break into that strange box we call accessibility and apply filters that replicate color blindness against images I already find colorful for a new series, Color Blindness Curves. When we create web pages, business cards, or perhaps even an exhibit we may remember people who see not less but “teach us to see the world through different eyes,” (James Nordby). Please note though that when I filter these for those of us without color blindness I change what the color blind see in my images yet again.

Photos digitally manipulated into geometric forms, using rich color or color enhanced photos. My analytical abstracts and jumping off point for the rest of my abstracts.

What does passion in my art look like? Fay Solais,

Nature has always been a reprieve from life—and I’ve needed it that long. When I’m sitting alone in the woods with the rain or wind rustling in the trees, I feel a quiet, a peace … It feels like my lungs are truly and fully expanding. When I had flowers year around to walk by on the way to or from my apartment, I felt momentary warmth. Going to the nursery twice a year delights me no end. I might as well be in Disneyland. I am at home and at rest among the flora of the world.

Of my heart and reprieve from life’s traumas are my newest digital photograph abstractions—Fay Solais (pronounced su-lish). Solais is Scottish Gaelic and Irish for lights. I am drawn to these cultures both for the Scots-Irish on both sides of my family (with the red hair inherited from my great grandmother to note it) and for the Gaelic grounding to things of the earth. Fay Solais is the pure unadulterated color palette of “green things” in digital art.

Black and white photographs of Arkansas barns.

All these wonderful moving kaleidoscopes are birthed from photographs. I rejoiced in their birthing because in them I found the kaleidoscope love since childhood. Every one of them has one element that is the same that creates the white in them.

I can’t tell you how many times in the past I passed barns without a glance. Now I notice these ordinary structures for the extraordinary variety of architecture from unnamed architects and for being stalwarts of the rural. When all else falls the barn stands.

The Roundup barns encircle to represent sheltering protection and endurance against the torrent of time and enclose and embrace in itself the landscape. They, like people, are both individual and part of a larger landscape.

These are all Arkansas barns captured in my haunts about the state as I scan ever back and forth, looking for gems to photograph. Some were easily found and accessible. Others I captured from outside barbed wire and no trespassing signs.

The pieces show well individually or together in 12” prints

Wildflower Paints blend the simplicity of wildflowers and the daisy fleabane layered in with the complexity of texture and brushstrokes of paintings.

I often photograph the wildflowers between breezes and in drenching sweat for stacking. They are from near and far but mostly as near as the “wild side” of my Brookside Dr or Boyle Park right in the middle of Little Rock, Arkansas.