your sun forever

I used to spend hours, uninterrupted, in my studio. These stretches, contemplating my work, felt imperative to making my paintings, which were filled with calm, quiet introspection. Then, everything changed, and I had five or ten minutes to paint at a time. Anytime I started to get lost in making, concentration was shattered, first by a baby’s cry and, later by the chubby fingers of a toddler’s hand reaching into my palette. It wasn’t working. With astronomical childcare costs, working from home or leaving the workforce entirely has become increasingly common for mothers. I was left with the question: how do I make it work? My solution was a collaborative studio where my child and I would work together, spending hours at a time in matching coveralls, lessons on color mixing and smeared in oil paint. Your sun forever is the result of this collaboration.

When I brought my newborn home in 2021, I found myself spending hours studying features that somehow felt simultaneously so familiar and so new. As he grew, every change and new personality trait brought that same combination of familiarity and the unanticipated. When I invited my child into my studio practice, I was welcoming the unexpected into my work. However, much of the imagery centers around things that are common in our daily lives: plants from our garden, my child’s toys, trees from our favorite neighborhood park, and revisitations of paintings I made before my child was even an idea that hang on the walls of our home today. The resulting paintings are full of movement, simple but busy, playful, unexpected yet familiar, very much reflecting life with a young child.