Artist
I’m inspired by the beauty of the pacific northwest and am privileged to have traveled globally to bring the friendships, sights, sounds, smells, and energy home with me to infuse my art.
My latest series is called “The world is Purple.” It consists of ten embroidered paintings which are examinations of the natural world around me: ten subjects that have caught my particular attention. I have made a practice to examine these ten subjects deeply, magnified closely, from afar, and energetically. What has emerged fascinates me. We tend to think of trees as brown trunks and green leaves, and the sky as blue, but what I’ve found is there is always, always a tint of purple. Whether it’s in a leaf, or a cloud, or some part of shadow, purple is always present.
This is particularly amazing because purple is a made-up color.
We have three colors of cone cells in our eyes: red, green, and blue. We are not able to read color wavelengths directly, and therefore these cone cells send signals to our brains to tell us which colors we are seeing. Generally, colors that are not red, green, or blue are interpreted by our brain because two groups fire together (e.g. we see yellow because red and green fire together and yellow is between them on the color spectrum). And so on and so forth down the color spectrum it goes.
If you look at a color spectrum, there is no purple. Blue and red are on opposite ends of the spectrum, in the middle is green, and because when we see purple our green cone cells are not firing, it means our brains are making up the color purple. It doesn’t have a wavelength. It is, scientifically, simply the absence of green.
This presence in absence has captivated me, especially because I see it so prolifically when I stop to examine deeply. Perhaps purple is magic, the influence we all exert on this world, our experience, and each other. There are five paintings I have yet to complete from this series.