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My head was always very tangled. I never thought of it as a bad thing, because it always kept me very busy. I could look into my head for decades of entertainment. As a child, I would carefully draw out what I would see there-Little women with wooden legs. I would give them melting hats that turned into spidersor teeth that would dangle into sunsets. Oh and birds”¦ dancing on their eyeballs or playing with decks of walls instead of cards. Images like those seem to pour right out of me. My thoughts were always so full that my art could hardly contain them. I would sit for hours in towers of markers
and would fill every single speck of a page with these very detailed, neatly patterned worlds.
I think of my childhood self as fairly dark. I was very taken care of, maybe too much so, but I was very scared and burdened with the boiling reality that real life would never be okay. Dressed neatly from head to toe in perfect pink dresses with lace and matching bows, the passing person never knew how far I had to run inside my head to escape my painful reality. I invented my worlds as a safe place that was full and unusual and the perfect place to hide.
As I got older, I chose to see the world differently. Though my imagination was still my safest escape, I learned to separate the truth from the lies. My work began to reflect the peace I was grasping on to and the pages didn’t seem so busy. The sharp edges became rounder and the hardness began to soften. I was able to concentrate more on the skill of my work than the places I needed to escape to. Because of the mazes I’ve traveled through inside my head, I am comfortable in the unusual.
