How did I come about? I wonder about this when I paint sometimes and I write about it in my blogs, reliving my childhood in stories. In my head the beautiful women I paint are the girls who were counselors at the playground. The ones who came to my aid when a bully ripped my sketchbook away from me, and bandaged my knee when I flew off a swing. They were the lifeguards who kept me out of the deep end until I could swim. Cousins, resting and reading in a hammock, along the river at Uncle Al's cottage. These images are with me when I paint. Mrs. Clemen, teaching her son Donny how to cook, comes to mind when I paint my model Anne teaching her nephew how to play like they are cooking in my studio. I had no idea that when I was studying to become an artist I would fall back on childhood memories for so many subjects to paint.
For years these memories sat in the dusty parts of my brain waiting for when a white canvas would be the dust cloth, dusting those treasures off to see if I can recreate those memories with a model. My cousin, asleep in the shade of an oak tree, catching a tiny ray of light in her open hand. For a moment, her white soft hand with that spot of light held me, feeling the breeze and the sound of the leaves high above. Put away in a corner of my brain, forgotten till a ray of light came through my studio window and I asked Jordan to pose so she could catch it. Only then did the memory of my cousin Barbra come back to me. The sound of the breeze in the trees filled me with fond memories. Memories relived through my open studio window, a breeze and the light through the tree outside, and the patient and lovely Jordan posing and resting.
