Bewildered
This is an ongoing series of large scale oil paintings created intuitively throughout the past several years. In 2019 my two young kids and I experienced a huge amount of very unexpected loss, which subsequently led to more loss and grief in the years following. My central focus since then has been healing. Along the way, I realized that all this pain I had suffered, couldn’t possibly go to waste. I felt very deeply in my soul that I was meant to turn my pain into something beautiful. There was simply no question.
After many months of outings to the woods with my kids while also focusing so much of my time on re-centering myself and realigning with my authentic purpose as a human, I suddenly felt very drawn to the concepts of the “wilderness” as a state of being. As well as the “inner wild” that exists inside each of us. Not “wild,” as in chaos, but rather the uncultivated place deep down in each of us. The place left untouched by expectations, conditioning, hierarchies, etc, etc, etc. So with all these thoughts rolling through my brain, I began to envision this series one piece at a time.
Even prior to the painful experiences of recent years, I have always naturally felt compelled to create art that speaks to the process of being human. My hope, at the very least, is that these paintings put the viewer in a place where they can better see their own humanity and their own “inner-wild.”
“Belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness — an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.””
