My new body of work will debut at Gallery 1261 (followed by a second installation at the Arvada Center) this coming spring at my solo exhibition entitled Genesis. These paintings explore themes of mystery, wonder, and science as viewed through the lens of magical realism that has so strongly characterized my first years of motherhood. Read on for a snippet about this body of work, a peek at the paintings, and my formal artist statement for the show.
A catalog is available (includes the essays that accompany each major painting).
Gallery 1261
Dates: March 16 – March 30, 2024
Opening Reception: March 16, 5 - 8 PM. The artist will be in attendance.
Location: Gallery 1261, 1261 Delaware St, Denver, CO, 80204
ArtSol’s “Dinner with Artists”: a four-course gourmet meal and interview with Robin Cole (**more info below)
Date: March 28th, 2024, 5:30 - 9 PM
Location: Gallery 1261, 1261 Delaware St, Denver, CO, 80204
Purchase Tickets here
Arvada Center
Dates: April 5 – May 5, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, April 5th 2024, 6 - 9 PM. The artist will be in attendance.
Artist Talk: Thursday, April 11th 2024, 5:30 PM
Location: Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada, Colorado 80003-9985
**Dinner with Artists is an unusual and exciting offering is brought to you by The Art Sol, a curatorial and event design team who bring a fresh perspective to contemporary art and the gallery world. For this event, Art Sol pairs an artist with a chef (and wine, of course!) who prepares a four-course gourmet meal, then invites a small group of collectors to gather and dine while they experience the exhibition. As the guests sit down to each course, Rose Fredrick (writer, curator, and fine art strategist for artists and collectors alike) leans on her three decades of experience in the creative world to conduct an insightful, in-depth interview with the artist as well as the chef, who has prepared each course thoughtfully in creative response to the work on display. Everyone joining us for dinner will have the opportunity to ask questions of both artist and chef. The formal aspects of the conversation are recorded as a podcast. Please join us for this remarkable event! Seats are limited, so be sure to reserve your ticket today.
The journey into motherhood as an artist has been a wild one. So different from what I expected…but filled with surprises and inspiration I had never imagined. It is not without its difficulties. From the emotional-psycho-spiritual trials of postpartum, to the sleepless nights and exhausted hours staring at the easel with drooping eyelids, to interrupted attempts to focus and broken up small bits of studio time—this challenge is definitely not for the faint of heart! But we do our best. We grow and adapt and learn to manage our time and energy. And babies change—daily it seems. My boy who wanted to be held 12 hours a day for the first 8 months of his life is a rambunctious toddler bent on raiding my paintbrushes and trash cans.
What I did not expect during pregnancy was an unprecedented dry spell on the creative front. But what I did not expect following birth was an unprecedented flood of inspiration, ideation, color, and the kind of daily magic that I never knew existed. The process of bringing a life into the world has acquainted me with previously unknown depths of human experience. The type of absolute purity and sweetness that an infant offers is not something I’ve found anywhere else, or had the chance to experience firsthand in my life. The process of falling in love with my son--in those first moments, in the early, blurry days and nights, and in a different way now, as his vocabulary expands at a dizzying rate and his little personality continues to bloom--has been beyond my wildest imaginings. It’s something I must address equally imaginatively in my paintings. I have found such joy in the process of shaking off all the “shoulds” and “should nots” about the content and style of my work that are stuck in my head from art school (to clarify: I loved my school!) and critics and essays and theory. The body of work I am currently building is a shameless exploration of beauty and magic and the stardust of which we are all made. I am very excited to share it with you in March at Gallery 1261 and in April at the Arvada Center!
You might enjoy reading more about our story and the creation of this series of paintings in Western Art and Architecture’s February feature article, “Infinity and Divinity,” or American Art Collector’s January issue spotlight article, “Emryonic Journey.”
Artist Statement for Genesis
My work explores an inner wilderness by way of an outer one. I believe that the natural world is not only an inherent part of us as human beings (and we of it), but that it is the original, exquisitely sensitive mirror in which we find our own inner terrain and wildness reflected. My work has always been an act of reverence for the natural world. There is an element of science in it, in the desire to study and observe. But there is an element of spirit, too, in the continual reaching for something just beyond the visible.
These images come as often from within as without, informed as significantly by emotional texture and imagination as observation. This is particularly true since becoming a mother—a primal event that has acquainted me with the processes (both physical and metaphorical) of germination, gestation, birth, and revelation. As I gaze at the world through this new lens, with a tiny hand clasped in my larger one, I find moments of the purest joy sneak up on me in a way they never have before, like new constellations among previously familiar stars. I find a sense of possibility suffuses our everyday lives, as beautiful and honest as the vision of a double rainbow above the vast plains of my creative life to date.
I am interested in elemental experiences that possess this added, dream-like resonance, like a vision of tiny embryonic mysteries, or the ethereal glow of a nameless light in a white landscape. These are the times when the veil feels thin, when an omnipresent but unnoticed magic moves beneath the surface of the ordinary. In my work, I aim to weave this need for understanding into a broader and equally honest experience of imagination.