My story

Growing up, art classes and, god forbid, art schools were something I never saw possible for myself. I always assumed that they were spaces for people who could “actually draw” and “make things realistic.” And that most definitely was not me. I couldn’t see then that abstraction was also an acceptable art. While I loved artists like Jackson Pollock, Picasso, Calder, Miró, etc, it didn’t dawn on me that I too could make art like that.

Instead, I studied architecture, environmental science, political science, and languages in college. After college, I enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps to become an Arabic linguist in 2004 and deployed to Iraq in 2007. There, I was struck by the scenery of a desert unlike anything I’d seen before. The dusty date palms and muddy rivers had a certain beauty, in quieter moments. The deployment was not without challenges however. It exposed me to a darkness and kind of evil I hadn’t fully understood prior to serving. I came back a changed person, and not immediately for the better. I harbored anger and resentments that I wasn’t yet able to channel into healthy outlets. My personal life was also extremely fraught and not a safe place to work through the moral complexities I was grappling with. It further deepened my isolation and pain.

It was only when I became a single parent that I began to finally explore creative outlets. It’s funny now, to recognize that finger-painting with my children became my first real play with paint and colors. Watching them uncritically create, with laughter and joy, helped me release tension that I didn’t realize I was carrying. This was when I began to hear the first whispers of I want to paint inside me.

I began following artists on social media, seeking out art and creative processes that spoke to me. And each time hearing that whisper I want to paint grow a little louder, a little more insistent.

The financial toll and overwhelming requirements of single-parenthood left little for art supplies that weren’t small quantities of crayons and markers and fingerpaints. It felt impossible to dream of big art, big paintings, big creative attempts. And still, the whisper grew. It became a voice, insisting, MAKE ART, PAINT. Until I could resist it no longer.

When I purchased my very own home (a feat that still astonishes me), it was several more years before I realized I was holding the literal keys to my very own big canvas. There was nobody to call it ridiculous, nobody to say it’s a waste of time, or talk down about hurting the home value. Just me. The owner. And the freedom to do as I please.

I quickly began scouring, filling, and priming the back of my white 1950s ranch in preparation for painting. The day of my very first painting, I stood there, black paint dripping from my hand (I couldn’t afford much in the way of brushes at the time), and scrawled out an enormous FUCK in foot-tall letters. A curse at the situation I was in at the time, an exhortation to not get overwhelmed, a battle cry that I would not give in, that I would create.

That FUCK is now covered over in a vibrant monstrous painting that has come to symbolize so much personally to me, and I’m sure I’ll cry the day I ever sell this house, when it gets covered over in bland beige or white or grey. But that day is distant, and until then, I’ll enjoy it.

Once the paint spilled out, I could not stop painting. But what is painting without at least a small audience? I tentatively shared my work with the one friend I knew I could trust to give an honest opinion. His support and critiques of my early works made growth possible along a faster timeline than if I’d attempted to go silently solo.

Now, I’m pouring out new projects. New ideas burble up in my dreams, or come inspired from a walk in nature and sudden unexpected places. I’m tackling bigger projects and bigger collections.

I am so excited for where this body of work will lead. I do hope you’ll come along for the journey.

- CHARLOT