I have never found solace in a class on how to paint pretty watercolors, or how to paint still lives, or beach scenes to sell to the masses of tourists on the coast. As of yet, I have never encountered a class entitled "How to translate your warped brain into art" Mostly, it just "happens" to the artists that suffer with this gift, and they either move with it, or against it. I have chosen to move with it.
I could stare at a pile of wood for hours, or a pattern on the wallpaper of my youth with repetitive patterns and swirling colors.... and out pops life. Faces, animals, scenes, ideas, different patterns, ruthless torturers and guardian angels that follow me with the everyday encounters of color and light. Faces of unknown folks will watch me, guide me, and tease me with their eyes made out of footprints in a plain rug, or a funny shaped man made out of the sock I dropped on the bathroom floor.
All the images I create come from an ethereal place that is yet unnamed to me, a place well hidden in the back of consciousness that can barely be tapped, and can sometimes be painful and exhausting to explore, but also rewarding and satisfying. The foundation of where our very life comes from, or just a jumble of the accumulation of experience and images I have encountered since the day of my birth. Life can not exist without creation. The age old question whether life imitates art or art imitates life...I believe they go hand in hand, one can not exist without the other. Life can not exist without creation, so I create.
Erin Merideth McFarland