Casting Paintings marked my return to the studio after nearly a decade away from making art.

Life happened and all the while, I felt the absence of something deeply familiar. I missed the part of myself that made things—the artist whose way of understanding the world had always begun with creation.

Returning to the studio gave that part of me somewhere to exist again. I brought feelings I had carried without knowing where to put them: frustration, grief, anger, and the tension of having lived so far from an essential part of myself. I imagined casting that darkness into the paintings, allowing it to enter the material and be transmuted into beauty.

The spiritual symbolism of smoky quartz offered an image for this process. Associated with absorbing and transmuting negative energy, the stone became a way of imagining what a painting could hold and what might change through making it. I could give difficult feelings a physical form and work with them through touch, pressure, and movement.

Working on a table with acrylic paint, graphite, oil pastel, rollers, and brushes, I built and disturbed the surfaces through compression, lifting, dragging, and repeated gestures. The effort sometimes left me exhausted. Each action changed what was before me, and I responded to those changes intuitively. Beauty emerged through an encounter with what hurt.

The finished paintings hold traces of that exchange. Looking at them, I see something of what I carried at the time, transformed into a surface that now exists independently of me. There is tenderness in that distance: a recognition of the person I was, what she was trying to release, and how she found her way back to making. The synchronistic numbers in the titles mark moments I experienced as alignment along the way.

Although these works began in my own emotional life, a viewer does not need to know its particulars to encounter them. Their marks, layers, and textures leave room for another person’s memories and feelings. Casting Paintings holds the possibility that something painful can acquire a new form—one we can return to, live with, and find beautiful.