For the longest time, I thought energy was all about loud visuals—bright colors, bold strokes, and high-contrast designs.
I didn’t think I could describe my work as having energy. My style is decidedly different: organic, worn, with muted colors and edges that don’t shout.
As I've grown in my art practice, I've started to understand energy as something far more intimate—a feeling that emerges during the creative process.
In my shed sits a trunk of my father's old Popular Mechanics magazines - a collection I've kept since he passed in 1988. These pages, now finding their way into my collages, bridge his world of fixing and making with my own creative path. Each magazine speaks to who he was: a maker, a fixer, always designing a solution for a new problem or drawing inspiration for a new project from those pages.
While carefully gluing down fragments of those papers, I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of energy. These aren’t just scraps; they are pieces of my dad’s life, reminders of me as a kid helping him fix something. I was only old enough to hand him the right tool, but I remember those summer nights working on his stock car in the driveway before a race.
My artwork might look worn, but it's charged with something profound: memory, love, and shared experience. Now I understand what "energy" truly means in art. It's not about visual intensity, but about the emotions and memories we pour into our work.
Learn more about my "Tiny Stories Art Journal" Course HERE
