Your Anger Doesn't Make You Hard to Love
What Has Been Brought From the Garden?
"What Has Been Brought From the Garden" is my latest collection of artwork. This collection of paintings is inspired by my painting and poem, "My Rage is Like a Flower Garden", that I wrote in the heat of the locked-down summer of 2020.
The focus of this collection was to explore the theme of feminine rage, creating work that was floral and feminine in color palette, but rage-filled in expression and intensity. This collection consists of large, attention-grabbing paintings that cannot be ignored because of their size.
In reflecting on my 2020 painting and poem, I wondered, "if my rage is like a flower garden, what have I harvested from it?" The paintings and accompanying writings are the answer to that question.
For so many years, I believed that my anger made me hard to love, so I hid her in the darkest corners of my psyche with hopes that no one would ever see her or hear from her, until I started painting.
My abstract work became my outlet for expressing my anger, the setting where I could sit with her, listen to her, and learn to be in relationship with her. I quickly learned that my anger was rarely alone and usually accompanied by the other neglected parts of myself, like my sadness, shame, guilt, and fear.
I started to understand the role of my anger - like the big sister I had always wanted for myself growing up - standing up for and protecting the tender parts of myself I had also been neglecting.
At first she’d come out in floods of tears and fury that would often leave me feeling like an exposed nerve, but the more I sat with her, the more peaceful she became, the more mature she became. We would always meet at the canvas where we would speak in the language of color and form and chart histories through marks and lines and the resulting composition was our coming together.
And after some time growing together, creating together, she has learned to speak with more tact, and I have learned the ways of loving her.
If you want to stay up to date on the progress of this collection and be part of the private viewing when it happens, you can join the Collectors Club here!