Details:

One of my very first large pieces. I remember sitting in a friends car saying “I want to go BIG” and thinking that 48x60 was a gargantuan size (I didn’t know that a few years later I’d be painting murals).

I originally called this piece Making It, because I told myself that when this piece sold I’d have “made it” in my career. That the sale of this piece was going to be proof of my success, and I swore I’d work on it continually till it sold.

The piece was over shadowed by much larger sales and thus it became a mute point to call it a marker of success, but it still had meaning. I realized later when I got smarter about my titles as means of communicating my message, that this piece was really about much more than financial success. It was a snapshot of ones life as well as of the entire world. It was a timeline as well as a map of relationships.

The lower part of the piece symbolized ones youth and how our interests and truest form of self expression is often pulled in various directions and distracted by things left and right. And about as we’re starting to discover ourselves, something quite literally comes out of left field to “take us out”. Something challenges us and our values, or path, our nature, our gifts so much that we have to define hard lines and boundaries. And when the dust settles from that scenario, what we are left with is an undeniable flow of creativity, of our way of serving the world.

Our gifts are undeniable at that point, and no matter what you do, it’s impossible to hide them.

The parallel message of this piece is that at any given time there are things happening in the world as a whole, and in our worlds as individuals. Our bosses relationship at home happening in one corner of our world- impacting us indirectly- is as important as the starving child in Africa.

So our expression of our gifts impacts not only ourselves and those immediate to us, it butterfly effects our entire planet.