I used to refer to my studio as my dungeon, referencing the greek god hephaestus and his smoking, dirty pit where he created the most beautiful objects. I was focused on steel sculpture then and the studio was dark, covered in metal dust and soot from welding. Now, this small space is white with colorful splatters everywhere. It's s cramped because I keep all my tools, but it's my haven, my respite from the world.

My focus on abstract sculpture shifted to a focus on abstract painting over the last fifteen years. Injuries caused by welding, grinding, and lifting heavy sculptures contributed to the shift, but weren't entirely responsible. I started painting with acid on steel long before those pains manifested. In all honesty, I was reluctant to give up my image as a bad ass woman welder and continued to make sculpture my professional focus long after I should have made the shift.

I've been called to painting and I think that's because sculpture captures a moment in time – an idea, a feeling, a single experience and my 57 years demands more. Sculpture is like poetry. Painting is a symphony.

It has movements, a chorus, and the crescendo when the summation of all its parts comes together in agonizing, beautiful tension and harmony.

My father was, among many things, a musician. When I was a child, he used to take me onto the roof of our house in Santa Fe New Mexico to watch the sunsets. One day, when I was about 10, the sunset was so beautiful it hurt to breathe and I told him so. His response was, “Destiny, all the beauty you see in yourself is merely (he wrote too and actually used this word) a reflection of the beauty inside yourself."

Throughout my creative career, I've pondered this. If the beauty in the world is a reflection of the beauty inside me, is the ugliness too? This question is my earliest inspiration and continues to inform my journey.

Now, like then, I am ripped raw by the beauty, ugliness, complexity, and interconnections that nature presents. When I began painting, I painted landscapes. Don't most of us start there? But, for me, the landscape itself was irrelevant and my paintings were trite. I wanted more, demanded more, of the feelings and thoughts nature inspired in me. I began to look at nature as metaphor and started to look deeper.

Lichen on an outcropping of granite made me think about hardship, endurance, and resolve. Which was stronger, the lichen or the rock. Ultimately, generations of lichen, aided by water and temperature and wind, will break down the granite, reduce it to the tiny grains of sand that fill the arroyo in which I walk. This thought inspired my painting, “Resolute.”

Peering closely at my lush front garden, the flowers and bushes disappeared, became snatches of color and bits of shape, until I could no longer discern the things I could label and categorize only moments before. I learned in my head something my heart has always known. The closer we get the less we understand. This inspired a work of the same name and helped me to internalize the importance of vulnerability and intimacy.

A trip to Vermont to view the autumn leaves just before the last election overwhelmed me with the juxtaposition of beauty and decay and the inevitability of change. Autumn's Fury is the piece that resulted from this experience and it celebrates a season's crescendo and ultimate decline. Both are inherently important to the cycles of life and the human experience.

At a recent art show, an elderly woman was drawn to this piece. She stared at it, put her face so close to it I thought her nose would touch it. Her mouth wrinkled up and her brows furrowed and, almost unwittingly, she reached her hand out to touch it. Her fingers gently touched its surface and she shook her head.

I had been watching her from a distance, curious. Finally, a little worried that she was touching the work, I approached. She looked at me, her face filled with surprise and dismay, the she asked in a childlike voice, “What's it for?”

I was taken aback and asked her what she meant. She said, “Well is it a counter top or a table top or what. What's it for?”

I was so surprised that all I could say was, “It's a painting.”

“Hmmph!” she said and quickly walked away, again shaking her head.

I laughed as I told the story to family and friends, but I keep thinking about the validity of the question.

What, indeed, is my art for?

Perhaps that interaction will eventually inspire a painting or maybe a book, but today the answer is simple. My art helps me, and hopefully my viewers, reflect on the great beauty, ugliness, and complexity of our gorgeous, challenging, joyful, grieving, rewarding, demanding experience as humans on this earth because my works are not landscape paintings. They're questions and answers in paint and texture on a board.