Blog Post: Home Sweet Home...
Home is more than a place. Home is a sense of belonging. So I've travelled and even emigrated to find those places. I'm most grounded, most myself, when seeing something overwhelming - sea, cliff, stars. It makes me feel small but very real. So the places in my paintings were each home for a moment.
Home for me has always been change. Growing up my family moved often, so no single place is even my childhood home. This seems to have led to a roaming desire. From my youth I wanted to go to Britain - for no tangible reason but idealistic visions of that world. (and reading too much Shakespeare) As a young woman it never occured to me not to travel where I wanted and alone. My very first "grown up" vacation was to Scotland. Without question, I knew instinctively it was where I belonged. So I returned to study and stay.
Still, home to me isn't a single location. I've never met the social expectations of finding a single place to live, settling down, or even being homesick for Chicago and my family. In this age of technology my family is with me all the time. I can speak to my mom from a clifftop on the Isle of Portland, or text-chat with my brother from a caravan in Yorkshire.
So having found my home - an entire island country - I'm still compelled to move around, to travel, to explore. Because home is more than the place. Home is the sense of belonging, the way a place makes me feel real. And I feel most grounded, most myself, when witnessing something awe inspiring and overwhelming. It makes me feel small but very real. And that is what my art is about - those moments and places where the world is too large, and being so large it embraces. Taking that light and colour of the place and putting the sensation into a painting that connects individually. Bringing you to where I was.
Because the places in each of my paintings was home for a moment.
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