I am a storyteller and a narrative painter. I began painting in earnest during a study abroad in Paris during what seemed like “a terrifying foray into freedom.” I’d never been out of the country, so I didn’t know what to expect. I supposed I would attend classes during the day and hole up in my room at night and finish a novel I’d been struggling to complete. That’s not what happened at all. Something entirely different and unexpected happened instead. Suddenly, my novel seemed uninteresting, blasé in fact, compared to what I learned from Dottie Brown, the art teacher who introduced me to the language of image and color. To my utter surprise, my paintings told stories of imprisonment and freedom I didn’t know I wanted, no, not wanted but needed to tell.
Winter took over Paris – rain, snow, wind – I hardly noticed. I was busily excavating years of unexamined memories and hidden responses. In essence, I discovered untended wounds inflicted by choices I’d made for the sake of security at the cost of freedom. Showing and telling didn’t change the past, but it altered my experience of my present circumstances, bearing witness, first to myself and then others, what it means to be fully alive.
Hope and Fear are twin components in my work. We come into the world alone and afraid. Hope is what Love gives. It’s impossible to love without offering hope, and impossible to offer hope without receiving love. I would like to extend hope to others by inviting them into the “thin places” I’ve experienced through my stories, poems, and paintings. Depending on God and the freedom I have been given through faith in Jesus Christ, I continue to learn how to live in freedom and share God’s overflowing love.
C.S. Lewis, Brett Lott, Calvin Miller, Makoto Fujimura, Henri Nouwen, Dan Allender, Tim Keller, Frederick Buechner, Wendell Berry, and Eugene Peterson are a few scholars who have deeply influenced my writing. While painting informs visually and gives me a measure of delight, writing, with its demand for precision, is one of the most powerful healing methods, connecting and transforming practices I know.