I recently spent about two months on a large computer project. Things like this take longer to do in a van, and longer on an iPad than they do on a desktop. After spending several years on the road and unable to back up my iPad because even high-speed hotel wifi was just not up to that task, I purchased a large external hard drive, and moved all of my Procreate files onto it, as well as onto Dropbox.

As I was nearing the end of this task, I sat down one afternoon and just played around with color. What ended up happening was that five pieces of art literally flew out into existence.

Sometimes art happens like this. It just creates itself, when you only meant to play. Other times, like in my upcoming Lanterns series, it takes forethought, planning, and illustration skill.

As someone who avoided drawing for a long time (maybe it was the charcoal?), I am glad I dedicated the time to studying Illustration for the last three years. It is much more fun on the iPad than learning it with charcoal or pencil.

Having started out as an analog collage and abstract artist, I have grown to do more illustrative and hybrid works over the years, as well as living in the van having necessitated a move to digital work.

Constant experimentation is fun and life-affirming (at least for me), but not necessarily legacy-building. When I first moved to Phoenix, I went to a party and sat talking with Ed Mell for a while. Ed is known for his angular paintings and sculptures of the Desert Southwest. He shared with me that he was really wanting to change his style, but that his agent wouldn’t let him. As someone who likes to try everything, I understood his frustration.

As to these Holographic Garden pieces pictured above, and the fact that they just sprung into existence in about four hours total, they constitute part of my body of work, but because I experiment alot, they may never contribute to a legacy.

So sometimes in art, as in life, we are knee-deep in color and splashing around on a joy-filled escapade, tweaking the Blending Modes panel as if it were some kind of musical instrument, and we end up with some beautiful art, and other times we plan and plot and are still able to create beauty. Whether the results of these two types of creating look coherent? Only time will tell.

What is your favorite type of art - abstract, illustration, or something in-between? Let me know in the comments.

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Before June comes to a close, I wanted to sneak in one more rainbow piece I found while digging through my archives. Again, this piece comes from a time 15 years ago or so, when I was first experimenting in Photoshop.

Honestly, this piece hardly required much in the way of artistic talent, just a bit of a designer’s eye. The weathered wood in this piece, and the always-effervescent rainbow spectrum coordinate to bring about a fun surprise, something that you wouldn’t expect to see.

Texture is an important aspect in life - metaphorically speaking, in interior design, and also in art. It is especially important, as I have learned over the years, to incorporate it into illustrations and abstract art created digitally. Digital art programs tend to leave texture up to the artist, as they inherently just lay down flat areas of color. It is up to the artist to not only shade and highlight, but to apply texture in a judicious way.

Though this image is simply a photograph with rainbow hues layered on top, it reminds us that life is full of rich, varied texture and color, and that even if worn and weathered, color does not lose its magic.

What kind of feelings does this piece evoke in you? Let me know in the comments.

*This and my other pieces will be available in the upcoming weeks on my website as art prints. If you’d like this image on a phone case, a pillow, or other item, please message me. I can make these even if they are not on my website.

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It seems Rainbows are everywhere in June, and who doesn’t love a good rainbow?

As I was going through all of my old computer files, I stumbled upon a few older pieces of fractal rainbows that I created years ago. They were made while I was first experimenting freely with digital art and color.

I’ve always been fascinated by fractals and by way light reflects on water. There is something mesmerizing about shapes echoing themselves and light being broken down into it’s native components that feels playful and innocently fancy.

These fractal pieces remind me of the way light shimmers and shifts on water. Yet there is also a fiery component to these, making them completely dramatic.

There isn’t anything inherently deep about these pieces. They are simply a result of what happens when you play and experiment. Fun for fun’s sake, and beauty for beauty’s sake.

Art has a way of reflecting things back to the viewer that he or she has inside - this is especially true with abstract art. I’m curious what these images bring to mind for you. Do you have a favorite? Let me know in the comments.

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I moved to State 48 on 8.8.88, and I lived there for 33 years. At the height of Covid, we bought a camper van, packed all of our worldly goods into a few storage units, threw our cat into the van and took off for the California coast.

If you’ve ever driven from Arizona to California, you are familiar with the long, flat stretch of nada that is the I-10. My most prominent memories of it are from the early days when there wasn’t much on it. No trip across the Ten was ever without a full commentary on how dull, flat and boring it was.

We’ve been in the van now going on five years, and we recently had the opportunity to drive from Arizona to California once again on the Ten. I wanted to make extra sure that we had the route mapped out and didn’t veer off track, because it’s not as if it’s a straight line that you can do blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back. Thankfully, we did much of it at night, in the dark.

I’ve put together a collection, a series of digital paintings that I am calling The Ten (Reimagined). The brightly-colored cacti and glowing desert floors in each of these pieces are my idea of what I would rather see when I drive the Ten. They’re the Ten, on acid.

In that vein, I want to share probably my favorite picture of myself, taken on the I-10 in Blythe, CA in 1988. I was living down on Spring Street in the Village and took a trip out west (that became known as Manifest Dustiny) with a photographer friend. It was shortly before I moved to Arizona.

This photo is actually a lomograph, because she took it with her original Diana camera. Yes, the photo was taken a long time ago, but because she took it with a Diana, it looks even worse (or better, depending on your point of view). This photo has always looked old and bleak.

I love that this photo speaks to how dull the Ten was (and still is) to drive. This photo is just so lomo, so liminal, so very analog.

Despite the fact that the Ten is the most boring, dull drive ever, I love that I was there in a time and place where the only thing between all of the Blowing Dust Area signs and Tarantula Ditch was a random phone booth in Blythe that I called my Mom from to tell her I was OK.

But it’s all right now, I’ve learned my lesson well, you can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself

-Garden Party by Rick Nelson

Rick Nelson wrote this song about a time when he went on stage at Madison Square Garden (yes, he meant that Garden) and tried to play some new songs. The crowd booed him, only wanting to hear his older hits. Garden Party went on to be his biggest artistic success, revitalizing his career. He wrote it in 1972 and it is a beautiful and melodic reminder for us today that sometimes the past can weigh us down.

I’ve had my art licensed since shortly after I began posting it in 2010. It’s been mostly successful on home decor - bedspreads, window curtains, pillows, etc. and, while I still love these pieces (below) and others, I’m not sure they will be represented in my new shop.

For the past 15 years, I’ve made art to please the market, the licensees, and the algorithms. I’ve had several websites, businesses, blogs, done my own POD, sold digital downloads, and learned illustration so that I could gain a different type of licensing gig. For sure, a lot of this was geared toward van living and my inability to paint large canvases in the camper that we’ve been living in for five years.

I created the above pieces when I first started playing around in Photoshop. I got myself a huge scanner and painted circles on a piece of watercolor paper, placed an actual ostrich feather on top, and used Photoshop to tweak the colors. These have been some of my most successful pieces on home decor.

I liken this older art to a beautiful yet very heavy necklace that’s become uncomfortable to wear. I am ready for the new, a clean slate, and getting back to the simplicity of just making art - rather than customizing myriad websites, placing imagery on every conceivable product, posting to numerous platforms and keeping up with all of the algorithmic changes.

As we spend our final summer in the van on the California coast, it will be in celebration and honor of not only the past five years of van life, but also my extensive and exhaustive art efforts over the last 15 years. It will be an acknowledgement of the past and a placing of the final gemstone in that beautiful but heavy necklace before storing it and moving forward in freedom, unshackled by the constraints of the past. It will be a weight lifted and a pure white canvas beckoning new creativity. It will also be a time to remember that experimenting with a brand new idea, melody or technology will likely yield up much more satisfying and successful results than staying stuck in the same old groove, even if the song is pleasant.

So, stay simple, stay true to yourself, and stay free.

Nature glitters with beauty

Glimmering with harmony and grace

In 2010 I had a blog. I remember one post where I related a dream I had where I was fighting with a shop girl about the benefits of dark sparkle. She said, “Why do you want this? It’s, it’s dark,” and I said, “Well, it’s dark sparkle!” I then went on to issue a long dissertation on the beauty and benefits of dark sparkle. It was a very emotional dream 😅

How to convey the beauty of dark sparkle to someone who can see only the bright light of the noonday sun? I love everything that glitters, but dark sparkle holds a special place in my heart.

My Mermaid Tea painting is one of the few paintings I’ve done that isn’t super brightly-colored. It also has digital glitter on it 💙

(Painting available soon)

Until then, Lapis Dreams and Kitten Toe Beans 🐈‍⬛

Hawaii

So, I am an artist who lives in a van and works on my iPad. Most of my art over the past 25 years has been sold in the home decor sector of the economy - mainly paintings and other home decor items like pillows, curtains, rugs, etc.

Many, many, many years ago, in a land forgotten by time, I double-majored in Studio Art and Clothing & Textiles. But I have always just LOVED interior design. Even as a kid, I wished that my mom and I could go into business together, where she would do the chatty-social-salesy thing and I would do the design and of course all of the office work. But alas, it was never meant to be because she was too in love with her job of just being a mom ❤️.

Today as I was scrolling through my phone, I got my normal email from Pier One which, as you know, no longer has any physical stores but is still quite replete with home decor items online. I specifically checked out the wall art category and got immediately depressed. Bury me now! I am not here for boring art. I am not here for a lack of color. I realize that the current economy is not the best and that people are cutting back, but need everything be so boring and dour? Not in my space!

I am here for the maximalists, the people who make bold choices, and those who live emphatically. Even when I paint something with only a few colors, it tends toward the dramatic. I can't help it - it’s the way I'm wired.

Soon enough I will have all of my artwork up on my site. It’s taken a while to remove enough things off of my iPad so that I can use it to upscale my images to 36 x 36 wall-sized canvases. Stay tuned, as I will be posting a lot of color in the coming weeks and months.

Until then, have a bold and colorful day! Oh, and Happy Mother’s Day 🌹