Current Series
Rooted by
TeaScapes
Take a Seat
Years
2018-present
Years
2018 - 2023
TeaScapes are meditational environments created through salvaged tea packaging layered with watercolor and gouache. The series began after a family trip to Wyoming and Utah that left me with a profound sense of presence. Returning home, I found myself drawn back to watercolor — not as sketches this time, but as finished works — using a stash of tea packages I'd saved for months without a clear purpose. The packaging itself became essential to the work: beautiful in its design, its ingredient names going on to title each piece. I drank each tea myself, intentionally pairing its healing properties with a sense of space — the open landscapes that inspired these pieces, and the meditative space each painting was meant to hold. Each piece was completed on a small watercolor sheet, then adhered to a cradled wooden board and protected with varnish.
These works have been evolving exploring various paint media including watercolor, acrylic, and oils. Many of them are mixed media made with image transfers of tea packages and chairs, inclusion of tea, coffee, gouache, and watersoluble crayons. Surfaces are also varied between watercolor papers, aquabords, stretched linen and wood panels.
Starting an image featuring a chair, came out of TeaScapes (see below), which began as watercolor paintings focused on honoring places where I found presence through a landscape, combined with healing tea. The first Take a Seat painting was created in the style of a landscape with the inclusion of a womb-styled chair. As time went by, I’ve focused on two different avenues: one of smaller isolated seats that conveyed comfort and the other considering chairs in a landscape that explore stability in instability, and eventually adding tethers and birds. Take a Seat comes directly from meditation practice, where teachers invite practitioners using that term.