About the Studio
Birthed in 2013, in Seattle, Washington;
Evening Star Maps now resides in an
Appalachian mountain valley, called Asheville.
“The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind, and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If the artists, who are self appointed to find the way into the Other, cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
Terence McKenna
“She really is
an artist!”
I woke up in this life with my paintbrush in my hands. I always knew I wanted to be an artist when I grew up and it was the first and only thing I told my Mom and my family (well, except that other time when I wanted to be a cashier so I could push the buttons!).
I remember visiting Asheville with my family when I was a teenager and buying a black artist’s cap. I excitedly wore it all over town, with my conservative family members grimacing under their breath; “she really is an artist.”
I accepted the compliment.
After one art class in the 12th grade, which became the extent of my formal training, I received some scholarships and planned for four years of art school. However in the end of that negotiation, I declined to be with my boyfriend. Soon after we broke up, I got myself into new arenas of mischief and mysticism and forgot all about being an artist until my mid-30’s. Listening, as was my daily habit in those days, to one of Terence McKenna’s myriad lectures, he spoke the words that changed my life forever hence;
“The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind, and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If the artists, who are self appointed to find the way into the Other, cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
And I looked at myself quite lucidly, in just a moment of time and thought, wow, I'm a good artist. I should do that.
And so I started doing it. And what was coming out of my hands was the sacred geometry of the solar system.
I had encountered sacred geometry for the first time during this period, and was completely enchanted by it. So I started drawing certain configurations and as I drew them, they kept pulling my heart into the sacred geometrical patterns that are formed by the movements of the planets all around us.
It had completely possessed me and has not let go of me since.
Years later, I was visiting my dad in Charleston and he casually pointed out an exceptional portrait that my sister had created of him and his sister when they were little, and my jaw dropped. My dad looked at me in surprise and said, “Well honey, we all have it. You're just the only one who decided that you like doing it more than anything else.”
And of course, as soon as he said it, I knew it was true. I have pieces of his artwork hanging on my walls. My grandfather's charcoal portraits of family members lined the enormous staircase in their 100 year old house, out in the country of North Carolina. And in fact, both my aunt and my cousin (on my dad’s side) are also full time artists.
On Mediums
When I began painting again in my mid 30’s, I started with acrylics because I had used them exclusively before, so I just started playing with them. A couple of years later, I got curious and started playing with watercolors and inks and immediately fell in love with them. I loved the surrender to the water element they demand.
With watercolors, you don't actually know what the piece will look like until it dries. You lay it down and then the water finishes the work and these patterns emerge that you couldn’t possibly have planned that are like watching the clouds
or milk being poured into a cup of dark coffee
or smoke curling in the air around you.
That's what watercolors do.
Working with inks is a different aspect of the water element in that, once you lay it down, it's done. It is utterly unforgiving. It happens in an instant, whereas watercolors are slow, ink is so fast. It takes a fraction of a second for a stroke, for a line.
It is influenced by your hand, yes, but it's also going to do as it damn well pleases and it's just so bold and so confident.
Working with water element mediums like watercolors and inks is like a collaboration. That's so much of why I love it. Acrylics are much more cerebral to work with for me because acrylics do what I tell them to do. When I want to paint something precise and exact, and I don't want the medium to bring anything to the table, I use acrylics and there's a time and place for it for that and I do sometimes use acrylics in my work.
But it's much less of collaboration and much more of me being in charge, such that, if I were to only use acrylics, I would feel very stifled by my brain, by my own conceptions, by my limited imagination and less surrendered to the dunede that seems to move more easily through water dominant mediums.
Currently, I have moved away from watercolors in favor of inks and I’m becoming so enchanted and obsessed by them and the process of creating with inks as well as the outcome. I love how fast it is. That really, what I create has nothing to do with my concentration or my strain, or how detailed I want to make it, opening the way for much more qi to flow through my body and into the works. I do detail work obviously, with the natal charts, but I’m so in love with the wild and free strokes of the Sumi brush.
I started using the Sumi brush when I moved to Asheville in 2015. I visited a little craft store downtown and they had Sumi brushes there and I had never seen one or even heard of one before. As I fingered the soft, horse mane fibers of the brushes, I realized that it was the brush that was used for Chinese calligraphy.
So I was really excited by that and brought one home and started painting with it and I haven't stopped. I've always used it as my primary brush and it was the only brush I used when I dove deep into the intoxicating world of painting with espresso starting in 2015 and still occasionally to this day.
I do have many, many brushes, and along with Sumi as my favorite, my other primary brush is a toothbrush!.. as this is the brush that I use to create stars. And it tickles my fancy that the most numinous, enchanting aspect of the work that I create is accomplished with such a banal, crude, human centric object. To me, it's the perfect marriage of the sacred and the profane and I love that the essence of that marriage is impregnated into every piece that I create.
