about the artist

“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what (s)he is.” - Jackson Pollack

I’ve been an artist all my life. I know, everyone says that.

Art has been the one constant throughout all of the ups and downs of life’s experiences. I owe that to what I consider a rebellious way of seeing and a near neurotic compulsion to make things.

At the age of four I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered “an artist” without hesitation or any knowledge of what that really meant.

At thirteen I was obsessed with drawing Peter Pan. I even embroidered an entire tapestry complete with the Jolly Roger and a map of Neverland. Man, I wish I knew what happened to that thing. 

I spent years learning to knit and crochet because the idea of living with and wearing something I made filled me with joy. Learning to make jewelry fulfilled the same satisfaction. 

In school, I thought briefly that I would be a potter because I fell in love with the hypnotic quality of the wheel and the slippery mud between my fingers. Then I stretched my first canvas and put paint on it.

My first series of paintings was completed in 2002. They were an odd dozen or so ranging in size between 16x20 to 36x48. A couple of them sold but the rest are gone with the wind.

There have always been illustrations and other paintings; sketchbooks full of realistic portraits and drawings of big eyed girls who too often looked like my mother or my beautiful, blue-eyed daughter.

In 2010 I started making prints to sell on Etsy while pregnant with my son. Eventually I’d have a professional printer pumping out dozens of orders a month from a room in my house.

My work got a lot of press at the time from blogs and magazines. As time went on, prints were featured on television shows like Nickelodeon’s The Haunted Hathaways and Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle. I even had my Zombies Print photographed with Norman Reedus from the Walking Dead.

Through all the years of art making - from pinch pots to screen prints to 3D sculpture - I’ve had the privilege to work hard for a thorough and very diverse art education through both traditional and independent training. I can make almost anything. I did it, learned it, defeated it all somehow. But no matter what else piqued my interest, I never stopped painting - not even when I had to do it on the wall of my bedroom in a single-wide trailer.

In the moments when there wasn’t a brush in my hand, I was studying artists from pre-history to mid-century through University courses and on my own time. Art history has been a passion of mine for decades and a source of constant inspiration.

I’ve had a lot of passions, but there’s nothing quite like the joy of stepping back and taking in a work in progress that seems to be everything I’ve ever tried to express. The awe in that moment is something I can only describe as sublime and whole.

There’s a longing to paint in my heart and hands that I pray never truly becomes satisfied. Because I’m a painter. So I’ll continue to answer the siren’s call to the studio, and hope with paint-stained fingers crossed that it never, ever goes quiet. 

- LB