I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Peru for three weeks in the spring of 2012 to immerse myself in the culture that I studied while I was a student at Memphis College of Art.
The influence of Peruvian textiles and color has always
played a dominant role in my artwork, but this trip was about observation and
research. I arrived with a plethora of supplies in my tool box, not exactly
sure what I would be most moved to use when creating my studies. My pen and ink
drawings are recordings of my travel, drawn on-site at each location. Sometimes
I was able to hang around the location long enough to finish out the drawings
in pen. Other times I did the studies in pencil, and then finished them from
memory. The encaustic paintings are the stories from my trip, and utilizes
snippets of my travel photographs combined with a huge heap of imagination.
This series is only the beginning of a much larger series in the works. What I
learned on my trip was conducive to my feelings about art in general, that the
journey is just as important as the destination!