48x60 Acrylic/ Canvas/ Glitter/ Resin. Shipping calculated at checkout. 

I’ve written it a lot of times before but the only way out is through. It always starts for me around October. The mornings get cold. I feel slower, more dim. I write more, talk less and barely move my body. Year after year, I dig myself into this hole. There are a whole lot of parts of me that don’t sparkle or shine. They are deep, quiet, shadow like mazes. I rarely create art about them because like a prison I can create with my own mind - they startle me. 

I grew up in Chicago. February was the end all be all worst of the winter. Sideways ice sleet, black snow on every curb, salt build up on the windshield, heavy traffic, constant chapped lips and cracked skin at the knuckles. It was like a living headache medicine commercial. I don’t miss it. Despite being in the desert and Southern California for 12 years it’s as if - during fall and winter - my mind goes back to the city and hibernates. Like it’s still 2002 and I’m sitting on the roof on Ashland, 9 months pregnant and counting the icicles. 

When I moved to Nevada I thought I would never be cold again. I wasn’t prepared for stretches of 115 degree heat in the summer. Heat like that makes 90 feel cold. I’ve always had this fantasy about moving though that when I got to where I was going I would be somebody else. Which every time has not panned out. Over and over again I would meet myself. I either grew or I didn’t. 

This winter has hit me with the color pallet of slate. Like dreams of moving away and an art career and change,  I guess when I started dreaming I dreamed my dreams as if when they all came true I would be and feel like somebody else. It’s been a hell of a lesson. As if all of the imperfection and anxiety, self doubt and inability to feel motivated, inability to focus and stay present or feel like I’m  good enough will just poof, shift. 

The truth for me is that if I don’t actively practice making a different, more positive choice - be it with food, exercise, writing, community. I dig myself into a hole. It’s a place that gets dark, like the color pallet of slate - and I start to believe there is no way out. 

And again - the only way out is through. Through the fear, through the ambivalence. From the light, through the dark, back out into the light - as the light. Way Out - the only way out is through and for me through is in the doing, not in the thinking. 

In the muted darkness of this work I find rainbows and pathways in directions that lay out the map forward. The map through - the way out (is still in.) 

After I finished this painting - daunting in her size, message and weight - I walked outside to a brilliant San Diego spring day. The daffodils and orchids were blooming. The air felt sweet, light. Every day I feed a slate gray stray cat rotisserie chicken in a ramekin dish in my front yard. I named him Larry. I love him because it looks like we both had a similar winter, but we’re still here in the sun - some days not figuring the way out, and some days knowing that for me it’s as simple as knowing I have and knowing that I am responsible for the choice of perception that I make.