“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
— Pablo Picasso
Art has been a part of my life since the beginning. Thankfully my parents encouraged it and signed me up for every extra curricular art class they could find. It’s never left me—though I’ve left it from time to time, allowing the “busyness” of grown up life get in the way.
Lovesome Creations is a way that I combat that busyness. It’s my conscious effort to both connect with nature and connect with my inner artist—to feel my head and my heart connected to my hands again.
Polaroid Emulsion Lifts
As I was studying photography in college I learned of an alternative processing course being offered that captured my attention. The problem was, it was a graduate course and I was only a sophomore. Nevertheless, I pleaded my case to the instructor and the department and I convinced them to let me take the course! It was hard work. Some of it was over my head—after all how could I break the rules of film when I was just getting familiar with what they were in the first place?
Cyanotypes, photograms, wet plate, palladium printing, cross processing C41 with E6, lith printing, and Polaroid emulsion lifts. I loved exploring all of these processes but realistically, most of them take too much time, too much money, and too specialized of a darkroom in order to keep doing them. Except Polaroid emulsion lifts. These little gems of the alternative processing world don’t require any dark room. Just a Polaroid and patience, basically.
I start with a Polaroid I’ve created and then with the help of a hot water bath, I peel away the layers of the print. The emulsion—where the image really lives in a print—lifts off and I coax it on to other substrates like watercolor papers, wood, etc.
Currently I display and sell my creations at the ArtsAlive Gallery in Frisco, Colorado. The gallery is the cooperative community gallery of The Summit County Arts Council (a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the arts in Summit County, CO). Popular with tourists, I love knowing that my little works find homes all over the world as people flock here for skiing, hiking, and biking the high Rockies and become enchanted with this amazing place I call home.
As an ode to finding my soulmate state in Colorado, my work is largely places I’ve hiked in this stunning landscape I get to call home. Every lift I create is a view of a spot that has moved me in some way. The emulsion lift process is meditative for me, taking anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to lift each Polaroid, and I love never really knowing where it will take me, how it will end up in its final state. It’s a process of discovery and I love that each one I do is absolutely unique and can never be created again.
If you’d like to commission your own bespoke emulsion lift, reach out!
The Sketchy Pet
When Covid happened, my wedding photography business abruptly came to a halt. It was a surreal and devastating time for those of us in the events business and it left a lot of us wondering what to do with ourselves while we waited in limbo. Do we throw in the towel and find a remote job? Do we wait it out?
While I was searching for what felt right, I began playing with my iPad. As I mentioned before, art has always been a part of me and I love black and white graphite and ink works. As I was playing around with Adobe Sketch (R.I.P) and Fresco, my eyes were opened to just how INCREDIBLE tools like the Apple Pencil have become and how insanely accurate different papers and pens and pencil graphics act like within those computer programs. I was drawing! Without paper. Without the mess. My Apple Pencil was now a tool of whatever old familiar art implement I wanted to use, just digitally.
This was an especially useful discovery as also during covid, we experienced an unprecedented worldwide shipping and manufacturing crisis. I literally could not get paper and graphite and ink if I had wanted them. I would have only had access to what I had on hand already, which wasn’t very much. So this new hybrid world of drawing by hand, but into an iPad became a whole new journey for me.
As an animal lover I put a call out to friends and neighbors for reference images of their pets to draw and thus, The Sketchy Pet was born! I am not doing commissions as often as I was during covid, but it’s still something that brings me great joy.