I put away my brushes at 21 after a particularly demoralizing art course in college and didn’t pick them back up again for 20 years. Every time I tried to sit down to paint, my perfectionism roared to life. I couldn’t even answer the question, “what should I paint?” because it felt like it had to be the perfect thing and nothing felt special enough. And so, I painted almost nothing, and when I did, I was basically the same painter I had been when I stopped in college.

Cue: the twin arrival of the pandemic and my mid-life crisis. I was massively burned out from leading back to back organizational transformation projects while parenting a toddler while cut off from social support. And when I turned 40, I realized that I could either spend the next 10 years not painting and still be the same painter at 50 that I had been at 20, or I could spend them painting and find out what kind of painter I could be.

I found myself newly intrigued by abstract painting–specifically, the elimination of the perfectionist-coded questions of what to paint and how much your painting resembled the subject. I found artists like David Mankin, Cy Twombly, Francis Bacon, Francine Tint, Lee Krasner, Cecily Brown, and Louise Fletcher who just seemed to play and started experimenting with layers, expressive marks, and letting paintings emerge rather than trying to force them towards some pre-determined end point. I jumped from watercolor to ink to collage to acrylic to all of the above, and experimented with ways to take the pressure off of each individual piece, whether that was working on paper, or using colors that scared me, or bouncing between several pieces at once. I often joke that I have ADHD and my art does, too.

And so at the end of the day, that’s what my art is about: releasing attachment to outcomes, getting out of my comfort zone, mixing different things together, trusting my intuition and seeing what emerges. It’s about practicing the same things in my art that I am trying to practice in my work and in my parenting. Each one of my paintings is a reminder that I don’t have to have all of the answers when I start, I just have to keep showing up and finding out over and over again what kind of artist, and person, I am today.