painter | Nine Cent Girl

The very act of painting has fueled much of the imagery found in my writing, while providing another creative outlet for me. A wild joy directs my brush strokes, color choices, even the texture of my painting, and of course, such unlocking of artistic freedom bounces back into my writing, in sentence structures, word choices, even how the characters feel. When I reminisce about all the different avenues artistic expression took me on, writing and painting rise to the top. Capturing emotions on canvas, returns me to decades ago, when I attended The New School in NYC, having the good fortune to study under a significant artist-teacher, the Abstract Expressionist painter, Norman Carton. His guidance is forever stirring at my core.

To allow both loves, painting and writing, to come together for Crazy String, is indeed a cover story.

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I think I have been pretty open about how much fun I have when I paint. The process is just joy to me, and I do hope to keep it so for as long as possible. But there is the matter of what to do with the large collection of paintings one acquires, in a relatively short amount of time I might add. Once you have filled your every vacant wall space, available nooks and crannies, space in closets and attics and barns, and given your friends and family canvases they may not have asked for, you are still in trouble because paintings are piled too high. And this is not only a problem for the novice painter such as myself; why I even read Mary Cassatt had 300 of her own paintings in her possession when she died. She was not alone: Vincent van Gogh had “over 850 paintings and almost 1,300 works on paper” in his possession when he died. We all ask: what to do with it all?

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