“The Creatrix”
24” x 18” oil on wood panel
The Why:
To create is to bring the whispers in your imagination to life.
Whether that is through painting them, sculpting them, negotiating them, dancing them, or writing them into existence.
When I create, this is how it feels. Like beautiful flowers budding into existence, blooming, and changing the air around me. I feel powerful and blessed. When I employ my creator nature, I feel like a queen in a realm of my own.
I love engaging with the creations of other people, too. Looking through their eyes. Understanding what is important to them. Witnessing their process, their struggle, their essence is as much an honor as creating my own works.
This painting is dedicated to the painters, the jewelry makers, the photographers, the musicians, the dancers, and the writers. The brave souls who let us see through their eyes, who let us listen to the whispers of their imagination.
The How:
This was my second full-sized oil painting...
and it took me a very long time to complete. Four months I sat with this wonderful goddess.
As part of a portrait painting class with Lioba Brückner, we were offered the chance to create a piece specifically for a show in an online gallery called Curio Art Gallery. Those who were interested painted a piece to the theme of “Echoes of Imagination” and submitted our works in progress for a mentoring critique session.
This image came into my mind pretty quickly upon hearing the theme. All creative works are echoes of some human’s imagination. And this is how I feel when I am in my own creative process…. like I’m conjuring beauty and meaning into the world. And once this image was set in my mind, I just couldn’t get it out. Even though I knew it would be a VERY complicated piece… and I would be working with a medium I wasn’t yet super comfortable with.
I started with creating a reference. I created multiple AI generations for various elements of the piece and Frankensteined them all together to form a rough reference for myself. Naturally, I changed much about this reference as I went. But it’s always important to have some kind of a guide when you are leaning into realism.
The Challenge:
One of the biggest challenges I faced during the process, was balancing layers based on both positioning within the composition (working with the furthest layers back first and working forward) and drying time with the oil paints. I had to do a lot of planning and adjusting as I worked in order to execute this complicated painting in a manageable amount of time. And of course it still took me a long time to complete (working on multiple projects at the time).
Another was working on such a small portrait. I had been working on improving my portrait skills; I had only ever painted a handful prior to this. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get the structure of her face and placement of features correct. One millimeter off, and she looked terrible!
The Reception:
She was accepted into the gallery show!
“The Creatrix”, my ode to creators everywhere, showed wtih Curio Art Gallery from August 2 to August 31, 2025.