When looking at the group of paintings and thinking about the time leading up to and during the making of them, I remember my family going to get our passports in February of 2020 with plans to go abroad for our first time at Spring Break that year. As everyone knows, by mid March everything had changed and we were in a worldwide pandemic. Lock-downs and quarantines began to be the norm. There would not be a trip to Ireland or London or even out west that year. Instead the kids would be confined to their rooms doing virtual school for the remainder of that 2020 and the beginning of 2021. Life was finally starting to feel more normal when I started these paintings but everything had changed—in ways we were only beginning to realize. Looking at these paintings makes me think of the places I’ve never seen. Destinations in my mind, exotic and wild, beautiful and unusual. Each painting is a journey. Somewhere. Anywhere. . . but here. I'd say this series of paintings were my traveling mercies.
