Where is your studio and what is your studio routine? My studio is in Forest City Pennsylvania, I like to call it the Forest City arts district. It’s one of the most affordable towns with lots of cheap space left over from its industrial/mining past—so we have a lot of artists and interesting characters!

What is your studio routine? I usually go to studio for a few hours several days a week. If I’m into a painting I just jump in and work on that. If I’m between paintings I tidy up and look at my collection of small experiment paintings and find something I want to expand on. Sometimes I just make more small experiment paintings where I try anything. I like to listen to books and podcasts when I paint.

Does your daily life influence your work? I spend a lot of time in the garden, which feels like my other artistic endeavor. I like working with volunteer plants that pop up; studying how they behave and interact with the other plants. I also work as a gardener when my son is at school, so I get to spend a lot of time outside. The garden and it’s natural cycles is a place of refuge for me. I’ve been learning whole systems yard design which I draw in the studio sometimes. It feels like a tangible way to help move the land we are on to our new climate reality.

Why do you use watercolor to make your work? I paint with watercolors because I like the way they sink into the paper—I like using a medium that is absorbed instead of sitting on top of the surface. And I like that watercolors mix well. I’m very choosy about my watercolors, kuratake and Prang are my favorite because the colors have excellent coverage. Watercolors are easy to move around, affordable and don’t require a lot of wasteful garbage or fumes like a lot of other paints. Also, no fear of spontaneous combustion like with oil paints!

What kind of role does the social / political environment play in your work? Lately I have been contemplating geologic time and our place in the cosmos; painting stars and space, also large and small pattern paintings. The pattern paintings are also emotional self regulation for these troubled times!! Sometimes painting is like attending to the political battles, persuading, organizing—it’s the smallest potatoes in the vast existential cliff that we spend our lives looking over. I think we are in a really awkward place as Americans on the precipice of climate disaster and capitalism run amok. It’s hard to know how to live right now.

I like tapping into my anger, especially in the morning. Like how Johnny Rotten sang “Anger is an Energy.” I feel it literally when listening to legislative news in the morning, it’s better than coffee! I get all worked up and get on the phone with my activist friend Tierney. She’s a brilliant librarian, and we really go beast mode—organizing postcards, registering folks to vote, canvassing, calling—all that stuff. It’s going to take all our talents. We have lost so much in just a year. This time last year we had bodily autonomy—now there are trans families fleeing, massive attacks on public education, unbelievable cruelty in the name of “life.” It feels like grim times in that way. Not to mention the work of helping the earth transition through climate change.

What does “compost the patriarchy” mean to you? I saw the phrase “Compost the Patriarchy” on hats sold by gardener @jjmgrows on instagram and I loved it! I feels like what we need right now. All the toxic masculinity that poisons the earth and our cultures can go right into the compost heap! 

Compost is so magical because it’s where everything ends and where everything starts—eaten by fungi and microorganisms—creating all the nutrients needed to feed the next generation.  

I am so glad the younger generation is exploring and dismantling so many harmful systems from binary gender, to structural racism, to income inequality. It feels like the proverbial fruits of the compost heap. Fertile ground to grow a new world!