A Creative Journey

Plein Air Painting

Panomania~ 2013 ...

Cathedral Sky

Interconnected Sieres 2009

Out of The Ashes Sieries

Architecture 1976 ~

i madonnari street painting. 1986 ~

I didn’t set out to create InTent.  It emerged from a much longer journey of making, exploring and following what interested me—from painting and collage to photography, architecture and eventually the inner landscapes I began to explore.

Looking back, I can see connections I couldn’t have seen while I was making the work. This is some of the path that brought me here.

For nearly forty years, I have participated in the annual I Madonnari Street Painting Festival at the Old Mission Santa Barbara. Each year, my daughter, friends, and others join me in creating a work that is temporary, collaborative, and shared—as much about the experience of creating together as the finished image. The festival benefits the Children’s Creative Project, bringing visual and performing artists into local schools.

Painting outdoors asked me to be present. The light was always changing, and there wasn’t time to think everything through. Sometimes a single mark seemed to arrive through the body and heart rather than the mind—holding a beauty I could have spent hours trying to create deliberately in the studio.  I began to know the experience of allowing something to come through rather than trying to make it happen.

Collage gave me another way of seeing—bringing separate fragments into relationship and discovering what could emerge between them. Materials, images and experiences that began apart could become part of something new.

After the Jesusita Fire burned through our property in 2009, I began gathering some of what remained. These materials had already traveled through several lives. Taken originally from the natural world, they had been transformed into glass, metal and the objects of our everyday lives. Then fire returned and transformed them again—melting, marking and reshaping what we had made. I became fascinated by these remnants and began bringing them together into new forms,  resembling butterflies. Nature gave us the materials. We transformed them. Nature transformed them again. I gathered what remained and made something new.

Another turn in the cycle.

When I got my first iPhone, I began playing with the panorama setting—moving, turning, and disrupting the camera’s expected path. The distortions and unexpected images became a new way of seeing. Many of these photographs later found their way into the fabrics and environments of InTent.

 
An exploration of sacred architecture and the natural world. I took imagery from the ceilings of churches, cathedrals, and temples and began “drawing” with these forms across an open sky—allowing human expressions of the sacred to meet the vastness of nature.

 

My architecture was never only about the building. I was interested in how a home could exist in relationship with its landscape—how we could experience the land from inside, move easily between indoors and outdoors, frame views, follow light and air, use energy wisely and make thoughtful choices about materials. I was designing physical spaces to support our experience of the outer world.

Eventually, that question turned inward. What would it mean to create a physical space that supported exploration of an inner one?