Wrapped Up

In the midst of all the IX prep in the last few months (hello, IX visitors!) I also had the honor of being asked to apply to Manna Gallery’s Wrapped Up show. On the one hand, I was neck-deep in reinventing my approach to painting from the ground up and already overcommitted. On the other hand, this would be my first gallery show. So I applied and got accepted!

Fine art is allowed to be more conceptual and less direct than commercial narrative illustration. The work I’ve been doing for IX leans heavily on atmosphere and mood to build a story, and for Manna I wanted to go all in on feeling and divorce myself from narrative entirely. The feeling of a time and a place is based on the light, the color, the shape language, the blurriness of edges. As part of my prep for narrative works, I often paint lighting and texture studies to learn more about how to translate certain elements into paint, and for this series I pushed them as far as I could.

It started with this photo:

September 9, 2020 in Alameda, CA

I took this at a gas station a few blocks from my house. This was in the midst of the 2020 wildfires, and what this photo doesn’t convey is that this was the first of three days when the sun didn’t rise. This is broad daylight.

[Because what everyone needed in 2020 was a natural disaster forcing us all to stay inside, away from the smoke, combined with a heat wave that we all got to ride out in our un-air-conditioned homes. We couldn’t go outside (smoke), we couldn’t open the windows (smoke), we couldn’t run fans (don’t want to stir up the smoke dust that has found its way inside) and we also couldn’t stay inside (95 degrees with no AC and no airflow). My husband and I live in a tiny house in the Bay Area and I remember at some point firing up the Airbnb app in furious anger and booking a weekend at some place in wine country. I didn’t care where, as long as it wasn’t here. It slept 10. We spent a glorious weekend playing a low-key marriage game of hide-and-don’t-seek where we just inhabited different parts of the house and enjoyed not hearing each other.]

It’s hard to overstate how surreal it is to walk outside and have everything be the wrong color. More than anything, it feels artificial, like there should be a door somewhere that lets me back into a full-spectrum world. I remember feeling like nothing that was happening in this orange world was actually happening. I also remember seeing the sky and wanting to capture the feeling of the landscape, so I grabbed a dust mask and my camera and went for a walk around the neighborhood. The first photos I took were boring. They looked fake, like someone had taken a bunch of normal photos and run them through an orange filter, and that’s when I hit on the idea to go find an artificial light source. Without those neon lights, you don’t get the real atmosphere.

That was five years ago and I’ve been holding on to this photo ever since, waiting for the right moment to do something artistic with it. When this opportunity with Manna came along, suddenly the moment arrived.

Season of Ashes, 8x8, oil on board, 2025

If you lived through this, you remember: the light was dead. Everything was dark. Nothing had color and the world was heavy.

Once I wrapped that up, there was nothing for it but to do three more paintings based on the feelings of the seasons we get out here in California.

We usually have wildfires in the fall, and then in winter, the rain arrives. Lots of rain. No snow, no thunder, just rain and gray. After no rain for nine months, we all use this as an excuse to burrow under as many blankets as we own and peer out at the world over our steaming mugs of tea. Everything is dim and fuzzy in the winter.

Season of Abeyance, 8x8, oil on board, 2025

Three months of rain and the return of the sun is the signal for all the dormant plants to hulk out and cover the landscape in vegetal green. Walking around at sunrise in my local park, I get to see the light peak over the horizon, between the buildings, and directly through the foliage. It glows.

Season of Emergency, 8x8, oil on board, 2025

And once the local flora has gotten over itself and spent its youthful exuberance, we get to summer. Now that everything has big leaves, the shadows get deeper. Being surrounded by leafy stuff is one of my favorite feelings. This was inspired by a local tea garden decorated here and there with glass ornaments. The glass added sparkle to the shadows, which is where I like to be when the sun is at its angriest.

Season of Solace, 8x8, oil on board, 2025

My memory doesn’t always handle specifics well, which is why a recent conversation with a friend had me explaining, “I don’t remember what you said, but I remember I was happy you said it.” With this painting series I got to explore what it means to sidestep the tedium of detail and get directly to an emotion. I enjoyed it. I didn’t have to agonize over how to paint a leaf or whether the shapes of buildings were totally accurate. None of that really matters to the feel of a memory and it’s just a distraction to the viewer when it’s mishandled in paint.

If you were to go through my camera roll, you’d find hundreds of washed-out, desaturated sunsets (along with extreme close-ups of insect anatomy, some boiling mud puddles, and the occasional muscular nude lady swinging a sword around, because I also have reference photos for painting. Proceed with caution). Each of those photos was an attempt to capture a feeling of a moment. Now, there are ways to take photos of pretty light. Step one is usually to lock the white balance to daylight so the camera doesn’t try to get cute with color “correction”. Then there’s fussing with exposure levels, and picking an aperture setting, and composing a shot. And I never bother to do any of it, because sunsets happen quickly and I’d rather look at the sunset than my camera. The thing is, when I snap those photos, it’s not the sunset I want to remember. I want to remember how happy I was that I got to see it.

All four paintings will be on display at Manna Gallery through December 13. I’ll be there for the December First Friday, Dec 5th, 5-8 pm. I’d love to see you!

All works available through Manna Gallery.

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