Collection
Emotions can sometimes act as our hero, our tormenter, or our silent acquaintance. They can provide us a necessary bolster or strip us of energy and weigh us down. Sometimes our emotions take on simultaneous and seemingly oppositional characteristics.
One thing that is constant and consistent about emotions, though, is that their presence is largely outside of volitional control. We may fool ourselves into thinking that we are controlling our feelings, but it is more likely that we have become skillful at strategies, such as masking, suppressing, displacing, and distracting.
Whether or not emotions are acknowledged or outwardly evident, they have the ability to deeply impact our experience of life, relationships, and interactions.
The Emotions I collection represent emotions captured in a single moment of time. In the next moment, these emotions dynamically shift and offer a different experience.
The viewer will notice that all of the pieces are square or circular. Artists, in general, tend to avoid these shapes because the viewer can feel lost and aimless because the eye does not know where it is supposed to start, how to proceed, or the location of the final destination. Such is our experience with emotions. Although we may want our emotions to be orderly and clear, as you will see in Emotions I, our experiencing of emotions is very much based on perspective and how we choose to navigate that experience.
My hope is that observers will notice their own emotional experiences as they proceed through – do you relate? do you feel defensive? judgmental? fearful? There is no wrong experience, there is only your experience.
Joy
Be thankful for being in the right place, at the right time, where the confluence of your life's events has led to this moment. Right now, your heart is lifted. Embrace this feeling. Joy is like a sunrise – even though it comes and goes for reasons outside of your control, you can have faith that it will come back.
Anxiety
Anxiety is just fear, wearing a mask of productivity. This deception also fools others into thinking that you have endless energy and work ethic; when in fact, you are running from an ever-worsening state of internal chaos.
Nostalgia
Nostalgia is built on those experiences that exist at our core. These are actual or fantasized experiences that shaped our vision of the world we want to live in. We often experience glimpses of these experiences that then elicit a mix of happiness, sadness, gratefulness, and grief.
Grief
Loss involves not only the loss of the thing that is no longer here. The longer term struggle is the void where there used to be a vision of how life will be. All that is left are the beautiful echoes of that potential future, and a path whose destination is still unclear.
Anger
Anger can be an opportunistic emotion, scanning for a toehold from which it can climb, grip, and dig in, which then creates other toehold opportunities for escalating anger. The result can be a sense of suffocation, loss of control, and even panic.
Loneliness
For a moment, consider a bat in the middle of a vast nothingness. His efforts of echolocation would be useless and he would have no sense of where he is or where he is going. Similarly, every day, we send out signals from our inner selves with the hope of validating responses that reassure us of our place in the world. However, if the responses are invalidating or missing, we can lose our sense of safety, direction, value, and self.
Mania
Individuals who have bipolar disorder will often stop medications when they are in the midst of a manic episode. The mania can feel desirable, especially after a period of depression, and make someone feel like they are intensively full of life. They may even recognize that they are on the verge of chaos, but often do not realize the consequences of their actions until after the manic episode is done.
Hope
For many of us, Hope is possibly the most difficult emotion to attain – by its very nature it is tenuous because it is not based on facts or certainty. Instead, hope is born only of the desire to have hope. Some will avoid hope because it creates a vulnerability and possibility for disappointment. However, hope is necessary because it drives growth and change.
I had planned for Emotions I to be a year-long project and it instead has been almost 1.5 years. I initially challenged myself to use ten 10″ resin frames that I had purchased on Marketplace many years ago, but as I progressed forward, I realized that not only was that size too limiting (i.e., my skill was not up to the challenge), but there was also a carved design in the frame that was not aligned with the art work.
I then ripped them out of those frames. I purchased some raw wood cradled panels that I was then able to paint and finish.
This abstract collection is largely inspired by the emotions that nature can elicit. There have been many times that I’ve been on a trail run and have had to stop in order to photograph or write down some inspiration for an Emotions I piece.
Emotions II will be a much more limited collection and will be back to the larger sizes I am more comfortable with. In the future, I hope to again challenge myself with a collection of smaller sized pieces – once I know how to “say” more with less. This is clearly still difficult for me, given the length of this section!