My garden starts out each year full of promise. I choose my favourite flowers in colours I love and carefully place them in the earth. As the season goes on... it gets kind of wild ... a bit tangled and untamed. And I've come to realize I like it that way... so I no longer seed in rows or cultivate or weed... I just plant and let nature take its course.

 

This series of paintings are metaphors of my garden... colours I love all tangled together, taking root, forging their paths and growing wild.

Alice Walker has been a long time influence on my work and my thought processes. I have always found her novels [personal favourite is The Temple of my Familiar], book of essays [especially Beauty When the Other Dancer is the Self in In Search of my Mother's Garden] and poetry to be deeply honest, brave and often earthy and sensual. Our world is a better place with Alice in it-- she is proof to me that one person's courage to speak/write can make a difference and that 'creating' is a worthwhile pursuit. Her advice to 'write what she wanted to read' instigated my own spin into 'create what I want to look at.'