Art Diaries

When I started painting, it was mostly because I wanted to spice up my journal and add a bit more color and creativity to it. It’s was very lighthearted and something I kind of decided to do on a whim. Little did I know how it would transform me. (A lesson in leaning into your intuition and letting it lead you!) After a couple weeks of painting simple backdrops in my journal I was noticing that I was actually really enjoying it and I started to consider expanding on it a bit more.

Luckily, Christmas was just around the corner and my sweet partner saw my budding new interest and bought me a painting isle and 4 large canvases. The next week, I went to a local school supply shop and found different kinds of paint to experiment with. I bought more watercolors, some gouache paint, and acrylic paint, a few different kinds of paint brushes and a few different types and sizes of canvas. Then, I just came home and started painting! I didn’t know what I wanted to paint so I began with a background color and just went from there.

In the beginning of my artistic journey I sort of unconsciously decided that I wanted to make art as an experience and as a unique expression all my own. Later I realized that I made this unconscious choice because a huge part of me wanted to something to be completely mine and without a lot of outside influence. It can get really noisy sometimes with all the opinions and all the different styles and I didn’t want that noise to interfere with my creative process. I didn’t look up “how to paint with water colors for beginners” on YouTube or, “how to create textured paintings”. I didn’t Google step by step instructions for how to paint flowers or silhouettes, or how to build color palettes. I didn’t go on Pinterest for art inspo or painting for beginners. While I believe those are all great resources to self-educate (especially for those who cannot afford art classes) for me it was about letting my own creativity be my education. It was about learning from my own lived-in experience — embodying my own unique flavor of muse magic and allowing it to take me to wherever it would. It was about letting go of my perfectionist tendencies and letting my art free me. It was about removing the need for a specific outcome and surrendering to the magic of the process.

My art is quite possibly the truest, most uncensored, raw expression of my soul. No YouTube video, Google search, or pin on Pinterest could ever have taught me that.

I create from a “live free” philosophy. Free of self criticism, free of fear of judgment from others, free of limitation, free of labels, free of perfectionism and unhealthy controlling tendencies, free of expectation and specific outcome. As I choose to live freely, so too I choose to create freely. It never has to be “perfect” — it just has to make you feel. And my art makes me feel like me, completely.