“The Lumiphant” - Oil Paint On Wood Panel - 2014
“How do you make your art glow?”
The single question I get asked the most about my work.
There’s a lot of technical answers. Hue. Contrast. Technique. Glazes.
But there’s something deeper than that.
And as I’ve really thought about it... perhaps the most personal answer is that my art began to find it’s light when I began the process of rescuing my darkness.
My darkness had been captured and colonized by a puritanical world.
And deemed unsafe and wicked by the religious value system I’d grown up in.
There was a large list of things I was never supposed to be. Say. Do. Embody.
Which ended up amounting to a phobic jettisoning of entire parts of my autonomy. A righteous corset, shaping my being, all the while holding my wholeness hostage in a contortion to which it never belonged.
But as I untied that corset, and began to exhale...
And decolonize my wildness..
I found that yes, there is darkness in me. Wickedness. The abuser. The beast. The addict. The lustful. The rageful. The liar. The selfish. The greedy.
But instead of seeing these things through a lens of shame, and looking for an external savior who might make me “white as snow”..
I began to see these “darknesses” as essential parts of myself driven by true hungers for life, and life abundant. Each one needing to be seen and related with in order to access their true hidden powers.. not alienated and hidden.. where they’d fool me into thinking that something could exist within me that doesn’t deserve True Love.
Just as a community is full of the entire spectrum of cultures and characters, our inner worlds are a wholeness of characters unto themselves.. each requiring relationship in order to find their hidden gifts. 
Because light cannot glow without the darkness.
That is the secret.
That is the wholeness that is True Love.
