Christy Sawyer~XT Paints

 I'd like to think I have a considerable amount of curiosity and hopefully, a healthy hint of skepticism.  But most likely my 'need to know' mind set results from an over-arching need for control, a basic insecurity that leaves me feeling vulnerable unless I have things neatly figured out.  I taught myself how to do video production, back in the day, when video cameras were tethered to  recording decks.  I learned to shoot, edit and produce videos for school, church, and weddings.  I even took a video recording deck apart to figure out what the parts were and how they worked.   With painting, I read everything I could, practiced with passion, gave away portraits to neighbors who were willing to sit for me, and basically taught myself how to paint.  I attended only two workshops, one on the business aspects of art, the other on incorporating photos into assemblages and mixed media.  Two problems with self-instruction is that you have blin...

Are you are the person who selects art to match your decor? Great!  Many of my pieces are bold, vibrant, and colorful!  If you admire or acquire art because of the symbology, you might hesitate when you glance at my alcohol inks because they aren't representational. You might struggle to name or describe a painting, to categorize or define it.  That's okay, that's what we all do to make sense of our environment, the world around us, including art.  I'll let you in on a secret which may explode some myths, so don't be too upset:  I don't know what it is I am painting until I am done. I don't have a spirit that takes over, automatically painting through me. Rather, I choose the colors and techniques to use but I have very little control, mostly just responses, to the process. When I get a result I like, I must be extremely careful and judicious what to add, subtract or expand upon because, due to the extreme reactivity of the medium, I most likely will mess up...

I'm told to write about my painting, what potential buyers need to know about who I am and why I do what I do and what the process is that resulted in this piece of art.  I've been accustomed to blathering on about this and that in my descriptions but not really doing the extremely difficult work of verbalizing what this particular piece of art is and why it matters to me, and hopefully, to you.   "But," you protest, "painting is non-verbal!  Aren't you doing yourself a huge disservice by trying to describe, by the written word, what is expressed in a visual medium?" I would say, in a traditional form of painting, "absolutely!" But in this abstract form of expression, it is absolutely needed! Besides, even the most casual observer would benefit from a road map to a traditional piece of art.  How much more wonderful, then, to invite you into the process, to sit down with me, as it were, and to tell you what I think I know about my art? Here exis...

Despite the fact that I consider myself a writer who paints and a painter who writes, I haven't done much of either for a while.  So, I've decided to simply write "something" and hope that it will break the writers block, the painters perturbation. Have you ever felt like a mailbox whose owner has been on vacation ~ stuffed? It's not that I don't have anything to say or paint, it's that I have too much!!! I may, at some point, talk about being married as a teenager, raising a family, losing a husband of 47 years and who, independent of those life events, I am. Like many of you, I'm still climbing out of the rubble of the last year of politics and pandemic, a year in which I moved to a new home, had my groceries delivered weekly and visited my friends on patios and porches even in the heat and cold.  So, yes, I am a survivor as are most of you.  And, facing the fourth surge of Covid-19, I am just as uncertain what the near future may bring, let alone wh...