The principle of not being attached to the outcome comes from The Bhagavad Gita, and has been a primary goal of my work by not letting the results of my action be my motive. So that when painting, I try not to allow the desire for an end result to guide me. Like the composer John Cage, I am a fan of chance and find beauty and meaning in the process of experimentation. I am interested in egoless expression and the ability of images to hold memories and energy. I have photographed portals and crystals, bodies of water and flowering trees, aware of their visual power to transmit consciousness.

As a child the marks we make are more open and expressive, without pretension. The purity of our connection to the divine, consciousness or whatever you want to call it is stronger because the mind (and the collective mind) has not begun to judge and detract from our blissful expression. As we age and develop our ability to critique, we shut down our free expression and contract around desires and societal acceptance. We cut ourselves off from the flow of creative energy. We become attached to the outcome, as the ego seeks to be loved, validated and congratulated. And it is through this attachment that we find pain and disappointment.

It was only through my surrender to consciousness that I was able to experience pure joy. But it took me a long time to get there. When I let go and my ego died, so to speak, I no longer knew what to make art about. I had so much identification with pain and suffering in my work that I struggled for some years to find a new process, to express my new awareness and find my voice. Because, despite wanting to be of service to the universe and become nobody, no one, and just merge with consciousness, I continued have a body, and a personality, and to make art. So I found my way back to myself through this philosophical approach put into action, and now I find my unique vision and taste, filtered through this lens, where I allow unique marks to surface and as I edit and compose as a part of the conversation. My subsequent choices are informed by the act of letting go.

As adults we are closest to consciousness when we connect to this experience called flow. As a child I made art freely, as I was given materials but no guidance. I found my voice, my way and my movement naturally, and it wasn’t altered until I became formally trained many years later in art school. The original mark making of my child self, the experimental openness of my teenage self, and the expansive desire for freedom of my 20 something self where told repeatedly to sublimate, hide and imitate others to find acceptance. An anxiety of influence set in and I became paralyzed and overly concerned about the meaning and end result. Experimentation and chance, energy and flow, had all been negated by this over-valuation of the product, the concept, the identity of the artist or the self consciousness of creating an iconic artwork.

I shifted into other mediums like sculpture and photography where I could create metaphors and avoid being accused of believing in the myth of the ego, authorship and repeating art history. I continued to push myself beyond my comfort zone and in search of truthful expressions of the human condition, questioning how we view, how we define and how we assume meaning. I continued to explore my love affair with with light and color through photography, while delving into the human psyche and identity politics.

In my 40’s I had 2 daughters and this brought me back to my heart and my innate desire to paint, while freeing me from caring about how it was perceived. At first I made photographic prints of my paintings, in an effort to make large immersive images I found digital reproduction to be the easiest and most conceptually interesting process. But at the same time I was painting small works on paper in secret for many years. I scanned my paintings and blew them up as large scale digital prints, often on canvas and stretched like paintings. I never shared the original work in an effort to protect my process, so that I could continue to develop my practice without influence.

Intuitively, over the next ten years I developed this approach to painting that mirrors my meditation practice and involves allowing myself to move and choose color and make marks fluidly while in flow. Without too much thought, I allow the energy to flow through me and onto the paper, and when I notice myself starting to think, edit or judge, I intentionally stop, intervene or change my approach.

It’s important to me conceptually to have this separation between the experience of viewing and judging and the experience of doing and creating. The purity of the actions are in the absence of the mind controlling the outcome. Like in mediation, I find myself allowing a consciousness separate from the busyness of the mind to permeate the creative process. Therefore, over time this process and I began to channel more specific gestures and energy, but still I found I kept returning to certain colors and being drawn to gold and silver, iridescent and fluorescent paints. My unique marks began to emerge like strangers who were long lost versions of myself. These elemental shapes began to take on a life of their own, embodying the feelings that wanted to take shape, to express and to eventually effect the viewer.

Now the gestures are changing, becoming more disjointed and abrupt, less about flow and universal spirals, more about internal dynamics and relationships between marks and in space. Like layers in space, the brush marks reference time and timelessness. Often reflective of the environments I was living in when the paintings were made, or the emotional landscape of my world, the compositions and energy of the work is reflective and connected to my reality. In Hawaii the paintings had blue and green and swirling spirals, in Mexico they were intensely bright colors and continuous circles, while in Paris, the palette has expanded and the gestures contain more friction. Another series has developed out of the process where the image is obfuscated, and the gestures made blurry .

And yet it took a long time to create these spontaneous marks. It took everything I have known, experienced and let go of. It took years of life and undoing to get back to the place where I could make images without exerting control. To be able to make choices while in flow and allow color and movement to develop freely took a conscious commitment to a practice of presence.