Slap.

“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” — Jackson Pollock

As a kid, my brother found a huge cabinet someone had discarded out on the street. The front folded down into a table. He spent days, painting that table. There were abstract sections of colorful lines and designs and a perfectly executed checker board. It was beautiful and I was wowed by his creativity. It inspired me to pursue my own visual creativity, inside and out of my school curriculum. I learned Chinese painting, pottery, pastels. In ninth grade, my art class actually scaled a classic Chinese painting of a phoenix with a plum blossom in its mouth, up onto a huge concrete drainage wall, directly visible and across the road from the high school lunch room.

Once settled in Taiwan at boarding school, art was my life blood. I spent hours and hours in the art room those four years, learning Chinese paper cutting, painting, and more advanced pottery. It was meditation and respite. By the time I was shipped stateside to college, Art was my chosen educational focus.

Then, life happened. I became a book writer, a mother, a runner, an urban sustainability wonk, instead. But, I can remember the slow process of realization that I’d abandoned myself along the way. During a difficult phase of life, I answered a call to submit to an exhibit at the local art center. As I ran out and bought items at the art store, or sat in solitude slapping paint of canvas, or out walking the streets of town, looking for things and scenes to capture, I began looking inward and remembering this is who I am. That began my journey leading home.

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