On a Saturday afternoon in January of 2007, my life changed. The miracle began with a ringing phone. I slipped out of a circle of singing women to answer, oddly certain that something monumental was happening. My son was calling from Scotland. After a bit of chitchat Dave said, almost casually, “You’re going to be a grandmother, Mama.”
Witnesses will attest that I said nothing but, “Wow!” for the next several minutes and then burst into tears as the call ended.
In a rather odd way, that phone call, and the two dear granddaughters who have come into my life since that day, are the reasons I make art.
You see, my girls are growing up in this world and, in my opinion, it could use a bit of healing. Suddenly, issues that had felt important to me for years got more urgent. I got involved.
As a 2018 graduate of the Color of Woman for Intentional Creativity ® teachers, my work, and my teaching, overflow with color and symbols and intention. Some of it abstract under layers already becoming powerful along the way. Strong, wise, creative feminine images I want my girls to engage. Cosmic images of the place we all hold in the created universe. Images that bring our dreams, and our brains, infinitely closer to fulfillment.
My work is social activism and spiritual journey. It tends to begin with a question. What is ours to cause and create? Who put the honey in our hearts? How do we share it with the world? How do we help our kids believe? Much of my work is filled with dots. Not simply the polka dots I’ve always loved, but prayer dots, for I create in a context that includes illness and abuse of power and school shootings and hurricanes, as well as new babies, and healing and hope. Praying in dots shifts the energy, for me, from the particular to the universal, tipping the world in the direction of wholeness.
All of which is lot of magic from a paintbrush and yet, it works! I, as the creator, am changed. You, as the witness, are changed as well in the blooming of new possibilities.
Mostly retired from work in pastoral counseling and hypnotherapy, these days my business card reads “Author – Artist – Activist – Grandmother.”
I’m a 2018 Color of Woman graduate and a JourneyWoman member of the Intentional Creativity Guild.
My work is generally acrylic on large canvases. Empowering images of the Divine Feminine. Visioning work. Vision quest journeys. Even stockpots and big blue dogs, for all is fair in the land of Cosmic Cowgirls! I also paint colorful abstracts in large sizes.
Along with my two Newfoundland rescue dogs who serve as studio angels, I teach Intentional Creativity workshops in the Southeast US, see private paint clients in Atlanta and via Zoom, and do commissioned paintings, especially family homes and farms, in an intuitive, folk art style. You are invited to learn more about me and my work at www.fiercelycompassionategrandmothers.com where I publish twice-weekly blog.