I am scared to share this art!  I am scared it will not speak to anyone but me.  I used to make art years ago and sell it online.  Back when ebay was new and the internet was the wild west.  I sold over 3,000 works of art then.  But I knew I was making art as a way of connecting and I knew who would connect with it.  Back then, my art was something I learned from but never anything I felt particularly connected to.  It never felt very personal, I guess.  I made it because I could and because people seemed to like it and that felt good.  This time is different.

This art is how I see and feel the world.  It is extremely personal.

I am wired differently than most folks neurologically.  I have been diagnosed with severe complex PTSD and severe ADHD and mild TBI.  I needed many years of therapy to really understand what emotions are.  My senses are finely tuned.  I can distinguish between a gazillion shades of blue, for instance.  But that means I am easily overwhelmed by sensory information.  And also by emotional information.  The world is hard for me to move through so I left the big city and moved somewhere very rural with a much slower pace and far fewer sources of sensory upset.  I am happier here and more peaceful, but I have few human connections and so I am even more inclined to experience life in my own way rather than adapting to more normal ways.

This art is the closest I have come to expressing how I experience life.

I paint the love I feel flowing through all living things.  I paint connections.  And layers.  I love how it looks when layers of paint and advertisements are worn through on the wall of an old building.  I love the layers of meaning and healing and scarring and joy and messiness that make up a complex human.  I love breaking through layers, scraping through one part to see what is beneath.  Rising above trauma and evolving into a beautiful mix of darkness and light.  I love rough textures that show destruction and I love beautiful colors and lines that show new growth.

Most visual stuff reaches me on a symbolic level.  I very much love symbols.  Letters, numbers, shapes, animals, words.  I invent my own mythology around things.

Since I began serious healing work about 5 years ago, I felt myself moving from being a resource for other people to becoming an actual person myself.  I never really felt like a person before.  Becoming a person was hard!  And scary!  And so confusing.  But I feel like I spent five years in a cocoon and now I am out and my wings are drying in the sun and everything looks beautiful to me, even the painful scary stuff.

I am not a religious person, but I do believe in a powerful Holy kind of love that flows through all living things.  And I do believe in spirits or Angels or our collective consciousness or the subconscious or some kind of benevolent force that guides us towards healing and love and wellness if we are paying attention.  I believe we are here to heal each other and I believe we are loved.  My art is how I am trying to connect with you.  To share my hope and to share my faith in you, my faith in us, my gratitude.  I am so grateful to have lived to experience this time in my life.

If you see the word God in my art, I use it to reference Divine Love, not a deity.  I have no problem with folks finding solace in religion, I wish I could, but I am deeply spiritual, though.  And in some way, I think this art is my own strange secular ministry.  Preaching hope.  And faith in love.

 

“Self Portrait”

2022

Melissa

In general, I am not a fan of explaining art, but I will share a few things about this one in the context of the writing above.  Starting at the upper left and moving clockwise…  This piece has a well layered skull, patterns and textures, the shape of a resting cat in the upper right, gears, a ladybug – to me those are symbols of joy – a howling lone wolf, and then a yellow bison shape in the lower right.  Both wolves and bison are personal totems.  Then there is a clearer more realized skull, hearts, a duck – I am sometimes know as an odd duck – an anatomical heart – I love those and have one as a tattoo – and in the center there are Angel wings.  For me, Angel wings represent trusting that powerful love that protects me and comforts me.  I am not concerned with whether that love is called Angels or God or inner truth or the subconscious or my spirit guides or optimism or the spirit of my dad who has passed or anything else one might call it.  I just feel it and I am grateful and I try to keep it at the center of my awareness now.