Welcome to AllArtWorks Featured Artist Series!
1. What other profession is similar to being an artist and why?
Any other profession can be similar to being an artist relative to whether one is creating their life. I think being an artist is like being an entrepreneur of your reality. If you can create your reality based on your thoughts and not on external circumstances, you’re at the core an artist.
2. What’s the nicest thing you can remember someone said about your work, or an individual piece?
Recently, I posted a self-portrait. A painter I respect very much said "You did something here that invites me in. That shares something I don't know but feel. And you did it in a new way. Love"
3. What’s one thing you’d like everyone to know about you as an artist?
I am a warrior and my art is fueled by that journey. I have a beautiful bipolar brain. Much of my work as an artist is to create awareness of the reality of stigma and our current system of mental health and the reality of the genius of our differences. The power of creativity and putting an end to the old paradigm of how we view mental illness. Shifting that paradigm to a more evolved version of what it really means to be too big for that box.
4. What was the last piece of art that you saw that blew you away?
My mothers' Nancy Swan Drew, a contemporary painter, who has been working on cartoons since the Pandemic. She is making art all the time and has humor and wit. A woman mother artist is the dream of her artist daughter.
5. What’s something you haven’t done but you want to do in art/painting?
I am going to create a show with large canvas installations that I would paint during a live exhibition with a symphony playing music, followed by a panel discussion on mental health and my beautiful Bipolar brain and other beautiful brains. If the question was about specifics with a painting project, I would love to paint a gigantic canvas, like Joan Mitchell size painting again.
First response neither. As a woman artist, I can appreciate the skill level and artistic abilities of these men and era. I don't have a favorite. I think that women were able to pose for these men and unable to attend the painting sessions with the models themselves. Marie Bracquemond was a student of Ingres and noted "he doubted the courage and perseverance of women in the field of painting..." (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met Museum). Ingres' opinion of women artists is historically accurate. The highlight here for me is it brings up the objectification of women, and the romantic notion when I look at the paintings has less of an impression than the historical timeline in which they were produced. Are both men geniuses? Yes, at the craft of painting.
*The reason we ask about Delacroix and Ingres is because they were contemporaries with wildly different styles!
