Happiness is a Paintbrush and Thread

If you were to pull up a timeline of my life, you could point to any given day and see me creating something. No matter how things are going in my life, my art has always been there to rest in. Whether that’s in the form of sewing, writing, drawing, or painting, my heart has always been most at peace while creating.

From the second I was brought into this world I was surrounded by creatives. My parents are both musicians, my dad a writer, and my grandma an amazing supporter of all art forms. When I was little, my grandma would take me and my sisters to local art fairs and museums. To this day I can recall the atmosphere of each event, whether it was making sand art as a souvenir, or playing in the interactive exhibits at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. When I was at home, I was watching classic movies with my sisters or practicing piano and the cello under the guidance of my mom. And when I was anywhere else, I was listening to the Golden Oldies station with my dad and finding the latest fantasy to read. Although I did not realize it at the time, those were truly the most pivotal moments in my life as an artist.

The journey to my current area of work has been a long and frustrating one. I started out on the music track, thinking I would probably go to Juilliard for college and spend my life playing the cello for some hoity-toity philharmonic. I stuck with orchestra for as long as I could possibly stand it, but all throughout those eight years of playing, I could not bring myself to stray from physical art. I developed into a sort of Jack of All Trades during that time, teaching myself as many hobbies as I possibly could. I started with scrapbooking which led me into cardmaking, then came sewing and embroidery, and finally drawing and painting. The more I created things with my own two hands, the more I fell in love with the idea of making art my career.

I can still remember the moment that I decided to switch my path from music to art. My dad had taken me to Disney World for my senior trip, and we were lucky enough to be there during the era of the new Star Wars movies. On our final day, we went on a special Star Wars walking tour where we got to see original concept art for the films and posters. The rest of the group had walked into the shiny new props display room, but I couldn’t seem to move on from the dusty old sketches in front of me. I had always been a film fanatic so it wasn’t a new idea to me that both film and animation were artforms in their own rights. The idea that captured me, however, was that you could make a viable career as an artist by applying your skills to create entire worlds on a green screen, or designing posters and characters. I knew immediately that I wanted to pursue a degree that would get me to the place where I could work with film in some capacity, and changed my college major when we got back home.

As I said, my artistic journey has been a long, winding one. I began college as a graphic design major, but the rigidness of my digitally based assignments completely disheartened me. I began doubting myself and the college experience in general, and my depression and anxiety hit a peak around my sophomore year. I changed my major to studio art and felt like a new human, but when COVID hit, my artistic expression was obliterated along with my happiness and motivation. One day during the summer of 2020, I called my sister and melted into a puddle of tears. I felt like I simply could not go on with all of the societal atrocities that were happening around us, and my mental health was about as nonexistent as my ability to change anything.

On the shoulders of my family and now fiancé, I was able to get help for my depression and anxiety, and finally around the middle of the fall semester I was able to channel my experience into my art. Realizing that I was in need of an artistic facelift, my oil painting professor, Ann, urged me to try something new. She gave me an assignment to create a painting using nontraditional materials, and I was drawn back to my time as a Jack of All Trades. I knew immediately that I wanted to incorporate embroidery floss into my paintings, and the rest is history.

I began by painting an abstracted bouquet of flowers, then enhancing the organic shapes by attaching on top of and sewing into the canvas with the thread. After gluing the thread down I would let it hang down the length of the canvas, then with help from my trusty floral patterned Fiskars scissors, I would snip away the extra thread to reveal specific parts of the painting below. The result was a controlled abstraction- one that I could plan out every step for digitally before putting anything to the canvas. This process became easier and easier with practice, and I created a large scale self portrait to finish off the semester. After the winter break, I knew that I had to continue cultivating the process and with Ann’s help, I realized that I could finally work film into my class assignments- which led to my current area of work.

The moment that I realized I could weave together my favorite movie scenes, my love of fiber arts, and my college coursework together was the same moment I realized I could now truly create my own happiness. After the psychological rollercoaster that I’d experienced in my previous college semesters, I decided that 2021 would be the year I put my experiences to work. I began by looking towards my favorite films and deciphering exactly what drew me to them. I discovered that my favorite movies across every genre were characterized by the outstanding emotional range in the actors and the characters they were playing. It was then that I fully understood my new concept: to create art that represents the human emotions that are too convoluted to simply describe.

By employing scenes from a wide range of films, the opportunity was presented to cover widely experienced emotions from an array of races and genders. The first paintings I created were large scale stills focusing on single scenes and tackled topics such as the state of mind of an uncontrollable addict, the dissociation of a man being forced to repress his anger, and the psychosis of a woman that had lost everything and was desperate to feel loved. The more that I worked on these large closeups, I began to understand that these characters’ stories could not be fully realized in one image. This summer, I moved my work to long panels with four carefully selected movie stills that give any viewer a full sense of the story and emotional state of the character, regardless of if they have seen the film or not.

My hope is that every person, when experiencing my art, sees a part of themselves that just seems too terrifying to face alone. That those dark corners of your mind are brightened, with the knowledge that you are not alone in your pain. After all, what is art for if not to gather people together and create community within the bounds of the canvas?