When you're invited to a beach holiday in Crete, just say yes.
Last summer I joined a dear friend for her 40th birthday celebration in Greece, and brought along a tiny watercolor set that I could carry on our adventures.
During a lazy afternoon by the sea, I pulled out my sketchbook and started playing with some simple, geometric patterns. This felt like it came out of my graphic-designer brain, and I liked the seed of a concept that seemed to be there.
Next day, we were at a rather impressive location and the mountain nearly demanded a portrait; how could I refuse? I spent a few hours soaking up the delicious colors of water, stone, sky.
The geometric pattern came back in the following days, but with slightly different shapes, and responding to the colors of the environment around me.
Then the patterns shifted in nature, negative space opening up within and around the units.
Later, morphing some more, they became scale-like, more organic, less geometric.
Maybe the inspiration for the scaly pattern is owed to the snake goddess of Crete. Early in the trip, a friend gifted me a small statue of the deity, and shared a passage from Joseph Campbell’s book Goddesses. In it, he explains that the two snakes, held high over the goddess’ head, represent birth and death, dying and resurrecting.
I returned home, but somehow the effects of the snake goddess stayed with me and I just kept painting this pattern. It went through many iterations, the colors becoming more dusky and neutral.
I painted it in pinks and browns. Blues and greens. Grays that tipped back and forth between pink-gray, yellow-gray, blue-gray, gray-gray.
Finally, last fall, the winding, evolving concept felt integrated and whole, like artwork that was really coming through me, saying what I wanted to say. From these beachside sketches, and the rabbit hole that opened up afterwards, I created several major pieces. These first pieces were shown during Miami Art Week in 2022 and there are more in a “research and development” phase now.
See the current artworks here: One, Two, Three, Four