Now that I live in California, I find myself often deep in thought about some other life. Living in 1990s East Coast America in the fall. It always smells and feels like Halloween, my Doc Martens are perfectly broken in, and I have a concrete duck on my front porch. With little duck outfits for every season. I write books and paint my paintings in a purple Victorian house on a quiet street. In this ideal, I’m calm and confident, and there’s never any rush. How many endings do I have to think I’m experiencing - in order to keep learning;
That everything works out just as it needs to.
I love the way that it’s the darkness of this painting that makes the light attach to it. When I first started selling my art, I had a dream that I needed a large citrine sphere to meditate and sleep with. I looked at thousands and finally found the perfect one. I named her Agatha. I don’t go anywhere without my four-pound crystal ball and maybe that’s weird but, I’ve lived enough to be smart about intuition.
I also have a large stuffed dragon. Being an adult at various points in life means occasionally having adult money. That day, I walked into a truckstop in the California desert, halfway between San Diego and Las Vegas - and there she was. The most beautiful dragon, with a giant wing span, just waiting for me. We skipped out of there together. Lately, every time I’m driving to Vegas and stop at that same truck stop, there’s a six-foot rainbow giraffe that I fight with myself. It’s the healed adult part of me telling the needy child part of me to be rational, for once.
But someday, I’m going to drive all the way to Barstow just to buy that rainbow giraffe and drive her home with me. We’ll listen to the Garden State soundtrack and I’ll even buy the $15 chocolate-covered gummy bears. With the top down on my convertible, respectively, as that’s the only way she’ll fit.
To be honest, dreams like these are the only ones I’ve ever dared to have for myself. I have to keep it simple. But anyway, back to my purple Victorian house and older, calmer, good witchier me inside and doing what I love to do.
I don’t know sometimes if my paintings are the lives I have lived or will live. I only know that when I look at them alone in stillness, that’s when I feel different versions of myself the most.
Who were we? Who will we be next? Sometimes my art is a map of the sky that lives deep underneath our schedules, requirements, plans, bodies, zip codes, and relationships. It’s what we really are in terms of frequency, light and vibration, and based on what we feel.
Because what we feel is what we are. This can be uncomfortable to accept. Unless we’re feeling like a good witch. All purple Victorian houses, Halloween, ceramic ducks, gummy bears, crystal balls, dragons, glitter, and art.